Alea

Tame the Chaos

Alea is a utility wrapper for turning random numbers into useful values. Give it any source of randomness, get a toolkit for dice, samples, strings, and more.

• Expressive: code with intent
• Crypto-safe and seeded algorithms out-of-the-box
• Array shuffling, weighted sampling, recursive template phrase generation, UUID, bytes and more
• Fully typed
• No dependencies
• ~2.4kb minified core

Basics

Install: npm i @xtia/alea

import { alea } from "@xtia/alea";

// default alea draws from Math.random()

// game development
const damage = alea.between(10, 20);
const crit = alea.chance(0.1);
const loot = alea.sample(['sword', 'potion', 'gold']);
const enemySpawner = alea.createWeightedSampler([
    ["goblin", 10],
    ["orc", 5],
    ["dragon", 0.1] // rare but possible!
]);
const enemy = enemySpawner.sample();

// data generation
const userId = alea.string(8, 'abcdef0123456789');
const fakeName = alea.phrase(nameTables, '{firstName} {lastName}');

// statistics
const [z1, z2] = alea.normal(0, 1);

For convenience, common character sets for string can be imported: import { charsets } from "@xtia/alea".

Crypto-secure

Use the same API layer, whatever the source of randomness:

import { cryptoAlea } from "@xtia/alea";

// cryptoAlea draws from runtime's crypto

const id = cryptoAlea.uuid();
const unpredictableDeck = cryptoAlea.shuffle(cards);

Custom sources

Use any randomness provider:

import {
    aleaFromFunc,
    aleaFromSeed,
    aleaFromByteSource,
    aleaFromSequence
} from "@xtia/alea";

// deterministic, with seed (uses Mulberry32 PRNG):
const seededRng = aleaFromSeed("abc123");

// custom source of randomness:
const xkcdRng = aleaFromFunc(() => 4/6); // https://xkcd.com/221/

// from third-party PRNGs
import { MersenneTwister } from "acme-math";
const mt = new MersenneTwister(mySeed);
const mtAlea = aleaFromFunc(() => mt.random());

// from random byte providers:
const secureRng = aleaFromByteSource(
    buf => hardwareRng.fillRandomBytes(buf)
);

// preset sequence for debugging/testing
const presetRng = aleaFromSequence([.1, .4, .8], "loop");

Or use a provided PRNG algorithm:

import {
    mulberry32,
    sfc32,
    xoshiro128pp,
} from "@xtia/alea/prng";

// each returns an Alea instance:
const fast = mulberry32("my-seed");
const varied = sfc32(1, 2, 3, 4);
const strong = xoshiro128pp(5, 6, 7, 8);

const reproducibleId = varied.string(12, hexadecimal);

Advanced: Probability Density Transforms

Transform randomness for different probability curves:

// exponential distribution
const expSampler = alea.transform(x => -Math.log(1 - x));
const waitTime = expSampler.between(0, 10);

// quadratic ease
const leftSkewed = alea.transform(x => x * x)
    .sample(items);

// square root ease
const rightSkewed = alea.transform(x => Math.sqrt(x))
    .sample(items);

Technicalities

• String seeds are hashed with DJB2-based accumulation with MurmurHash3 bit diffusion.
• bytes() queries the RNG provider once per 4 bytes; transform curves are applied at the 32-bit level.