Does the MATLAB function 'rand()' use hardware seeded RdRand system call available in the main PC processors?

I could not find any documentation that MATLAB does. This website describes the system call: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand .

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

No, it does not.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/rng.html

"rng('default') puts the settings of the random number generator used by rand, randi, and randn to their default values. This way, the same random numbers are produced as if you restarted MATLAB. The default settings are the Mersenne Twister with seed 0."

If you look at the list of supported random number generators there, you will see that they are all deterministic: given the same seed they will repeat exactly.

That leaves only the question of how you can initialize them differently. The key to that is "rng('shuffle') seeds the random number generator based on the current time."

The hardware random instructions are not used at all.

[Emmett Redd]

Thanks. Sometimes it is good to have a random number generator repeat and sometimes not.