MATLAB: Does the MATLAB function ‘rand()’ use hardware seeded RdRand system call available in the main PC processors

randrdrand

I could not find any documentation that MATLAB does. This website describes the system call: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand .

Best Answer

No, it does not.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/rng.html

"rng('default') puts the settings of the random number generator used by rand, randi, and randn to their default values. This way, the same random numbers are produced as if you restarted MATLAB. The default settings are the Mersenne Twister with seed 0."

If you look at the list of supported random number generators there, you will see that they are all deterministic: given the same seed they will repeat exactly.

That leaves only the question of how you can initialize them differently. The key to that is "rng('shuffle') seeds the random number generator based on the current time."

The hardware random instructions are not used at all.

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Rand(‘seed’,1)

Seeding the random number generator means initializing it to a certain status. Seeding inside the loop means, that all "random" numbers created inside the loop will be the same in each iteration:

for i = 1:3
  rand('seed', 1);
  disp(rand);
end

Result: 0.51291 0.51291 0.51291

This is not very useful. Seeding RAND outside the loop allows you to reproduce the results:

for j = 1:2
  rand('seed', 1);
  for i = 1:3
    disp(rand);
  end
end

Now you get two series of 3 different numbers:

 0.51291  0.46048  0.3504  0.51291  0.46048  0.3504

MATLAB: Random numbers

help rand
doc rand

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Rand(‘seed’,1)

MATLAB: Random numbers

Related Question