Generate random numbers using C++11 random library

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Stephan T. Lavavej(stl) from Microsoft did a talk at Going Native about how to use the new C++11 random functions and why not to use rand(). In it, he included a slide that basically solves your question. I’ve copied the code from that slide below.

You can see his full talk here:

#include <random>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::random_device rd;
    std::mt19937 mt(rd());
    std::uniform_real_distribution<double> dist(1.0, 10.0);

    for (int i=0; i<16; ++i)
        std::cout << dist(mt) << "\n";
}

We use random_device once to seed the random number generator named mt. random_device() is slower than mt19937, but it does not need to be seeded because it requests random data from your operating system (which will source from various locations, like RdRand for example).

Looking at this question / answer, it appears that uniform_real_distribution returns a number in the range [a, b), where you want [a, b]. To do that, our uniform_real_distibution should actually look like:

std::uniform_real_distribution<double> dist(1, std::nextafter(10, DBL_MAX));

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