Pseudo-random reference sequences with Mersenne Twister (2^19937-1) using GNU Octave

Computationally intensive numerical tasks such as those involving statistical resampling require robust algorithms for generating large sequences of pseudo-random numbers. Where the amount of data to be processed is relatively moderate, the paradigm of reproducible research is in principle suitable to be applied not only to algorithms, free software, data and metadata, but also to the involved pseudo-random sequences themselves. However, finding reference sequences of pseudo random numbers suitable to enable such a deep reproducibility may be surprisingly difficult. Here, sequences suitable to be used as reference uniformly distributed pseudo-random datasets are presented. The dataset of sequences has been generated using Mersenne Twister with a period of 2^19937-1, as implemented in GNU Octave (version 3.6.1) with the Mastrave modelling library. The sequences are available in plain text format and also in the format MATLAB version 7, which is portable in both GNU Octave and MATLAB computing environments.