[go: up one dir, main page]

IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/csdana/v52y2008i10p4587-4593.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Microsoft Excel's 'Not The Wichmann-Hill' random number generators

Author

Listed:
  • McCullough, B.D.
Abstract
Microsoft attempted to implement the Wichmann-Hill RNG in Excel 2003 and failed; it did not just produce numbers between zero and unity, it would also produce negative numbers. Microsoft issued a patch that allegedly fixed the problem so that the patched Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 now implement the Wichmann-Hill RNG, as least according to Microsoft. We show that whatever RNG it is that Microsoft has implemented in these versions of Excel, it is not the Wichmann-Hill RNG. Microsoft has now failed twice to implement the dozen lines of code that define the Wichmann-Hill RNG.

Suggested Citation

  • McCullough, B.D., 2008. "Microsoft Excel's 'Not The Wichmann-Hill' random number generators," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 52(10), pages 4587-4593, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:csdana:v:52:y:2008:i:10:p:4587-4593
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-9473(08)00162-X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. B. D. McCullough, 2006. "A review of TESTU01," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 21(5), pages 677-682.
    2. McCullough, B. D. & Wilson, Berry, 1999. "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 97," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 27-37, July.
    3. McCullough, B.D. & Wilson, Berry, 2005. "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 1244-1252, June.
    4. Wichmann, B.A. & Hill, I.D., 2006. "Generating good pseudo-random numbers," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 1614-1622, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. H.-J. Sun & Kaoru Fukuda & B. D. McCullough, 2017. "Inaccurate regression coefficients in Microsoft Excel 2003: an investigation of Volpi’s “zero bug”," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 32(4), pages 1411-1421, December.
    2. Hargreaves, Bruce R. & McWilliams, Thomas P., 2010. "Polynomial Trendline function flaws in Microsoft Excel," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1190-1196, April.
    3. A. Yalta & A. Yalta, 2010. "Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research?," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 35(4), pages 371-394, April.
    4. Yalta, A. Talha & Jenal, Olaf, 2009. "On the importance of verifying forecasting results," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 62-73.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Guy Mélard, 2014. "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2010," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 29(5), pages 1095-1128, October.
    2. repec:jss:jstsof:34:i04 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Yalta, A. Talha & Schreiber, Sven, 2012. "Random Number Generation in gretl," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 50(c01).
    4. H.-J. Sun & Kaoru Fukuda & B. D. McCullough, 2017. "Inaccurate regression coefficients in Microsoft Excel 2003: an investigation of Volpi’s “zero bug”," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 32(4), pages 1411-1421, December.
    5. Wichmann, B.A. & Hill, I.D., 2006. "Generating good pseudo-random numbers," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 1614-1622, December.
    6. Oluwarotimi O. Odeh & Allen M. Featherstone & Jason S. Bergtold, 2010. "Reliability of Statistical Software," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1472-1489.
    7. Yalta, A. Talha, 2008. "The accuracy of statistical distributions in Microsoft® Excel 2007," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 52(10), pages 4579-4586, June.
    8. Yalta, A. Talha, 2007. "The Numerical Reliability of GAUSS 8.0," The American Statistician, American Statistical Association, vol. 61, pages 262-268, August.
    9. A. Talha Yalta, 2010. "The Accuracy of Statistical Distributions in Microsoft (R) Excel 2007," Working Papers 1006, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Department of Economics.
    10. McCullough, B.D. & Heiser, David A., 2008. "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 52(10), pages 4570-4578, June.
    11. Hargreaves, Bruce R. & McWilliams, Thomas P., 2010. "Polynomial Trendline function flaws in Microsoft Excel," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1190-1196, April.
    12. A. Yalta & A. Yalta, 2010. "Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research?," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 35(4), pages 371-394, April.
    13. Keeling, Kellie B. & Pavur, Robert J., 2007. "A comparative study of the reliability of nine statistical software packages," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(8), pages 3811-3831, May.
    14. Yalta, A. Talha & Jenal, Olaf, 2009. "On the importance of verifying forecasting results," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 62-73.
    15. McCullough, Bruce D. & Yalta, A. Talha, 2013. "Spreadsheets in the Cloud - Not Ready Yet," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 52(i07).
    16. Charles G. Renfro, 2009. "The Practice of Econometric Theory," Advanced Studies in Theoretical and Applied Econometrics, Springer, number 978-3-540-75571-5.
    17. Berger, Roger L., 2007. "Nonstandard operator precedence in Excel," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(6), pages 2788-2791, March.
    18. Kusters, Ulrich & McCullough, B.D. & Bell, Michael, 2006. "Forecasting software: Past, present and future," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 599-615.
    19. Härdle, Wolfgang Karl & Klinke, Sigbert & Ziegenhagen, Uwe, 2006. "E-learning statistics: A selective review," SFB 649 Discussion Papers 2006-024, Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk.
    20. McCullough, B.D., 2008. "Special section on Microsoft Excel 2007," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 52(10), pages 4568-4569, June.
    21. Massimo Gangi & Giulio E. Cantarella & Antonino Vitetta, 2019. "Solving stochastic frequency-based assignment to transit networks with pre-trip/en-route path choice," EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics, Springer;EURO - The Association of European Operational Research Societies, vol. 8(5), pages 661-681, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:csdana:v:52:y:2008:i:10:p:4587-4593. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/csda .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.