Editing Mersenne Twister (section)

== Alternatives ==
An alternative generator, [[well equidistributed long-period linear|WELL]] ("Well Equidistributed Long-period Linear"), offers quicker recovery, and equal randomness, and nearly equal speed.<ref>P. L'Ecuyer, "Uniform Random Number Generators", ''[[International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science]]'', Lovric, Miodrag (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, 2010.</ref>

Marsaglia's [[xorshift]] generators and variants are the fastest in the class of LFSRs.<ref>{{cite web|title=xorshift*/xorshift+ generators and the PRNG shootout|url=http://prng.di.unimi.it}}</ref>

64-bit MELGs ("64-bit Maximally Equidistributed <math>\textbf{F}_2</math>-Linear Generators with Mersenne Prime Period") are completely optimized in terms of the ''k''-distribution properties.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Harase|first1=S.|last2=Kimoto|first2=T.|date=2018|title=Implementing 64-bit Maximally Equidistributed F<sub>2</sub>-Linear Generators with Mersenne Prime Period|url=https://github.com/sharase/melg-64|journal=ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software|volume=44|issue=3|pages=30:1–30:11|arxiv=1505.06582|doi=10.1145/3159444|s2cid=14923086}}</ref>

The [[ACORN (PRNG)|ACORN family]] (published 1989) is another ''k''-distributed PRNG, which shows similar computational speed to MT, and better statistical properties as it satisfies all the current (2019) TestU01 criteria; when used with appropriate choices of parameters, ACORN can have arbitrarily long period and precision.

The [[Permuted congruential generator|PCG family]] is a more modern long-period generator, with better cache locality, and less detectable bias using modern analysis methods.<ref>{{cite web|date=27 July 2017|title=The PCG Paper|url=https://www.pcg-random.org/paper.html}}</ref>