New monads/MonadRandomSplittable

From HaskellWiki
< New monads
Revision as of 20:02, 17 November 2006 by Remi (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.


When using New monads/MonadRandom, one may also want to use a MonadRandom equivalent of RandomGen's split function:

class (MonadRandom m) => MonadRandomSplittable m where
    splitRandom :: m a -> m a

instance (Monad m, RandomGen g) => MonadRandomSplittable (RandomT g m) where
    splitRandom ma  = (RandomT . liftState) split >>= lift . evalRandomT ma

MonadRandomSplittable can then be derived for Rand by GHC:

newtype Rand g a = Rand { unRand :: RandomT g Identity a }
    deriving (Functor, Monad, MonadRandom, MonadRandomSplittable)

Example of usage

test   :: Rand StdGen [Bool] -> (Int, [Bool], Int)
test ma = evalRand (liftM3 (,,) (getRandomR (0,99)) ma (getRandomR (0,99)))
                (mkStdGen 0)

Then

*MonadRandom> test (replicateM 0 getRandom)
(45,[],55)
*MonadRandom> test (replicateM 2 getRandom)
(45,[True,True],0)

*MonadRandom> test (splitRandom $ replicateM 0 getRandom)
(45,[],16)
*MonadRandom> test (splitRandom $ replicateM 2 getRandom)
(45,[False,True],16)

*MonadRandom> case test undefined of (a,_,c) -> (a,c)
*** Exception: Prelude.undefined
*MonadRandom> case test (splitRandom undefined) of (a,_,c) -> (a,c)
(45,16)

Laws

It is not clear to me exactly what laws splitRandom should satisfy, besides monadic variations of the "split laws" from the Haskell Library Report [1]

For all terminating ma and mb, it should hold that

  liftM3 (\a _ c -> (a,c)) getRandom ma getRandom === liftM3 (\a _ c -> (a,c)) getRandom mb getRandom

For monad transformers, it would also be nice if

splitRandom undefined === splitRandom (return ()) >> lift undefined

For example,

>runIdentity $ runRandomT (splitRandom (return ()) >> lift undefined >> return ()) (mkStdGen 0)
((),40014 2147483398)
>runIdentity $ runRandomT (splitRandom undefined >> return ()) (mkStdGen 0)
((),40014 2147483398)

But

>runRandomT (splitRandom (return ()) >> lift undefined >> return ()) (mkStdGen 0)
*** Exception: Prelude.undefined
>runRandomT (splitRandom undefined >> return ()) (mkStdGen 0)
*** Exception: Prelude.undefined

I have no idea how to express this idea for monads that aren't transformers though. But for Rand it means that:

>runRand (splitRandom undefined >> return ()) (mkStdGen 0)
((),40014 2147483398)

Why?

In replicateM 100 (splitRandom expensiveAction) There are no RNG-dependencies between the different expensiveActions, so they may be computed in parallel.