Introduced by R.S.Wikramaratna,[1] ACORN was originally designed for use in geostatistical and geophysical Monte Carlo simulations, and later extended for use on parallel computers.
The main advantages of ACORN are simplicity of concept and coding, speed of execution, long period length, and mathematically proven convergence.
One of these,[7] warns of an unsatisfactory configuration of the acorni() routine when using GSLIB GeoStatistical modelling and simulation library,[8] and proposes a simple solution for this issue.
In 1992, further results were published,[11] implementing the ACORN Pseudo-Random Number Generator in exact integer arithmetic which ensures reproducibility across different platforms and languages, and stating that for arbitrary real-precision arithmetic it is possible to prove convergence of the ACORN sequence to k-distributed as the precision increases.
In 2009, formal proof was given[4] of theoretical convergence of ACORN to k-distributed for modulus M=2m as m tends to infinity (as previously alluded to in 1992[11]), together with empirical results supporting this, which showed that ACORN generators are able to pass all the tests in the standard TESTU01[13] suite for testing of PRNGs (when appropriate order and modulus parameters are selected).