Hi folks, I have been implementing an LSH-based knn scheme which could be donated to Mahout. LSH, obviously, needs good random generators. The problem is that existing code in Mahout seems to favor java.util.Random which is widely known to be sub-optimal. At the very least it does not keep up with state-of-the-art like MersenneTwister and Well. So, Mahout also has RandomEngine which is fine as an interface but does also does not contain implementations of, for example, the new WELL generators.
Apache's common-math project seems to have all of these generators, including WELL variants, but under yet another interface, RandomGenerator. So, the question to the list is: would it be acceptable to contribute code which makes use of org.apache.commons.math.random.RandomGenerator rather than Mahout's built-in org.apache.mahout.math.jet.random.engine.RandomEngine? Thanks, Randy McRee
