A search for short-period Tausworthe generators over $\mathbb{F}_b$ with application to Markov chain quasi-Monte Carlo

A one-dimensional sequence $u_0, u_1, u_2, \ldots \in [0, 1)$ is said to be completely uniformly distributed (CUD) if overlapping $s$-blocks $(u_i, u_{i+1}, \ldots , u_{i+s-1})$, $i = 0, 1, 2, \ldots$, are uniformly distributed for every dimension $s \geq 1$. This concept naturally arises in Markov chain quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC). However, the definition of CUD sequences is not constructive, and thus there remains the problem of how to implement the Markov chain QMC algorithm in practice. Harase (2021) focused on the $t$-value, which is a measure of uniformity widely used in the study of QMC, and implemented short-period Tausworthe generators (i.e., linear feedback shift register generators) over the two-element field $\mathbb{F}_2$ that approximate CUD sequences by running for the entire period. In this paper, we generalize a search algorithm over $\mathbb{F}_2$ to that over arbitrary finite fields $\mathbb{F}_b$ with $b$ elements and conduct a search for Tausworthe generators over $\mathbb{F}_b$ with $t$-values zero (i.e., optimal) for dimension $s = 3$ and small for $s \geq 4$, especially in the case where $b = 3, 4$, and $5$. We provide a parameter table of Tausworthe generators over $\mathbb{F}_4$, and report a comparison between our new generators over $\mathbb{F}_4$ and existing generators over $\mathbb{F}_2$ in numerical examples using Markov chain QMC.