tree 5d7360452d4614bfebf2464f60bf78e4be43a8d6
parent a2dfe5d278eae0864397a046a8206342a426d2bd
author Josh Bleecher Snyder <josharian@gmail.com> 1502838091 -0700
committer Ian Lance Taylor <iant@golang.org> 1504877180 +0000

math/rand: make Perm match Shuffle

Perm and Shuffle are fundamentally doing the same work.
This change makes Perm's algorithm match Shuffle's.
In addition to allowing developers to switch more
easily between the two methods, it affords a nice speed-up:

name      old time/op  new time/op  delta
Perm3-8   75.7ns ± 1%  51.8ns ± 1%  -31.59%  (p=0.000 n=9+8)
Perm30-8   610ns ± 1%   405ns ± 1%  -33.67%  (p=0.000 n=9+9)

This change alters the output from Perm,
given the same Source and seed.
This is a change from Go 1.0 behavior.
This necessitates updating the regression test.

This also changes the number of calls made to the Source
during Perm, which changes the output of the math/rand examples.

This also slightly perturbs the output of Perm,
nudging it out of the range currently accepted by TestUniformFactorial.
However, it is complete unclear that the helpers relied on
by TestUniformFactorial are correct. That is #21211.
This change updates checkSimilarDistribution to respect
closeEnough for standard deviations, which makes the test pass.
The whole situation is muddy; see #21211 for details.

There is an alternative implementation of Perm
that avoids initializing m, which is more similar
to the existing implementation, plus some optimizations:

func (r *Rand) Perm(n int) []int {
	m := make([]int, n)
	max31 := n
	if n > 1<<31-1-1 {
		max31 = 1<<31 - 1 - 1
	}
	i := 1
	for ; i < max31; i++ {
		j := r.int31n(int32(i + 1))
		m[i] = m[j]
		m[j] = i
	}
	for ; i < n; i++ {
		j := r.Int63n(int64(i + 1))
		m[i] = m[j]
		m[j] = i
	}
	return m
}

This is a tiny bit faster than the implementation
actually used in this change:

name      old time/op  new time/op  delta
Perm3-8   51.8ns ± 1%  50.3ns ± 1%  -2.83%  (p=0.000 n=8+9)
Perm30-8   405ns ± 1%   394ns ± 1%  -2.66%  (p=0.000 n=9+8)

However, 3% in performance doesn't seem worth
having the two algorithms diverge,
nor the reduced readability of this alternative.

Updates #16213.

Change-Id: I11a7441ff8837ee9c241b4c88f7aa905348be781
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/55972
Run-TryBot: Ian Lance Taylor <iant@golang.org>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Rob Pike <r@golang.org>