I vote for these instructions to go near the top of the docs; I also couldn't work out what I needed to do when I looked at Boost.Random a few months back, but these instructions make it sound fairly simple. What I wanted to do was generate a random number in the full range of a integer template parameter, e.g. whether I used the template with unsigned char, or a 128-bit integer. (in the end I decided to come back to this when I needed that flexibility and implemented using 32-bit integers and the standard library's srand48() and mrand48()). So, can Boost.Random generate a random number to match the type? Darren
Assuming min and max are plain-vanilla integers, the following instructions:
typedef boost::uniform_int<> UniformDist; UniformDist dist(min,max);
produce an object named dist that holds your uniform distribution. The following instructions:
typedef boost::mt19937 BaseRNG; BaseRNG rng;
produce a "base pseudo-random number generator", which produces numbers along the *entire* range of integers (-2^31 to +2^31 or something like that). boost::mt19937 is one of many such generators provided by the library.
The following instruction puts it all together and gives you the random integer generator you want:
boost::variate_generator<BaseRNG&,UniformDist> your_generator(rng, dist);
Note the ampersand; your program will fail silently if you omit it.
The base random number generator (rng) holds the seed function; simply call
rng.seed(42L);
or whatever seed you want to provide.
Finally, assuming you want to store your sequence in a vector<int>:
vector<int> sample; for (int c = 0; c < desired_size; c++) { sample.push_back(your_generator()); }