- PCG is not crypto, everybody should understand that. It's for simulation and rendering.
- PCG mainly replaces Mersenne Twister which is in c++11. The Twister has a LOT more state and is a LOT slower for less randomness.
- In rendering and simulation speed really matters, and PCG excels there.
- Xorshift is another algorithm in the same class. I would really like to see an objective comparison. In my cursory engineering look PCG seemed better.
- Fast PRNG is almost a new field again: It's not crypto, but immensely useful. How did the Twister get into C++11 while it is so much worse than PCG or Xorshift? Nobody cared!
- Maybe PCG should have been a paper at SigGraph.
- For the style of the paper, I think one contribution is rethinking PRNG outside crypto. That deserves and requires a lot of exposition.
Yeah, it's not for crypto. But I think it's for more than simulation and rendering. It's meant as a general purpose PRNG. It's just as good for randomized algorithms like picking the pivot in quicksort, or playing games, procedural content generation (PCG!), or whatever you want to use it for.
I think that the whole point of the prediction difficulty stuff is that a library (e.g., C++11's) with general purpose PRNGs can't know how they'll be used. Maybe some idiot write code for a gambling machine in C++ and use whatever PRNG is to hand. There was a story in the news the other week about people going around casinos predicting slot machines, so maybe this has already happened! PCG is trying to make your simulation and rendering code fast while trying to offer at least some defense against egregious misuse.
Basically PCG is trying to be a good all rounder. As you say, it's meant as a replacement for the Mersenne Twister.
- PCG is not crypto, everybody should understand that. It's for simulation and rendering.
- PCG mainly replaces Mersenne Twister which is in c++11. The Twister has a LOT more state and is a LOT slower for less randomness.
- In rendering and simulation speed really matters, and PCG excels there.
- Xorshift is another algorithm in the same class. I would really like to see an objective comparison. In my cursory engineering look PCG seemed better.
- Fast PRNG is almost a new field again: It's not crypto, but immensely useful. How did the Twister get into C++11 while it is so much worse than PCG or Xorshift? Nobody cared!
- Maybe PCG should have been a paper at SigGraph.
- For the style of the paper, I think one contribution is rethinking PRNG outside crypto. That deserves and requires a lot of exposition.