Timeline for Are slot machines purely random or do they pre-calculate every spin?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S Mar 19, 2018 at 11:53 | history | mod moved comments to chat | |||
| S Mar 19, 2018 at 11:53 | comment | added | Oddthinking♦ | @DanielRHicks: Let's take it to chat. | |
| Mar 18, 2018 at 19:09 | comment | added | Tgr | What incentive is there to cheat when they can just make the game statistically favor the operator? | |
| Mar 18, 2018 at 12:45 | comment | added | Daniel R Hicks | @Oddthinking - Consider that it's often impossible to decipher the logic of a computer program when there was no intent to conceal the algorithm. Don't you think any reasonably competent 7th grade programmer could hide "cheats"? | |
| Mar 17, 2018 at 23:39 | comment | added | Oddthinking♦ | @DanielRHicks: They don't have to stop short of examining the internals. There are also statistical tests for looking for biases and non-randomness. | |
| Mar 17, 2018 at 18:40 | comment | added | Daniel R Hicks | How, exactly, would one "prove" (short of examining the logic/mechanism) that a slot is truly "random", vs using a pre-programmed sequence? | |
| Feb 8, 2017 at 14:27 | comment | added | slebetman | @ChrisW: These things are regulated by law and your specification is not enough by law to simulate poker. To properly simulate a deck shuffle, if you run a million games then the distribution of which card is on top of the deck should be equal - that is, you must guarantee that the random shuffle should generate an equal probability of getting king of club or three of diamonds or any of the other cards as the top of deck. Indeed you need to guarantee this for all positions in the deck. In gambling, the statistical distribution is as important as unperdictability | |
| Nov 13, 2013 at 22:54 | comment | added | Dan Haynes | @ChrisW Picture an RNG that gets re-seeded with a random value every third time you use it. There are numbers that generator will never produce in a million years. If one of those numbers maps to a royal flush, the player would never hit one. But the true odds of getting a royal flush in poker is fixed. If you play enough hands, it will happen. It has to be preserved across power outages/resets otherwise the players will place a bet, draw some cards and then pull the plug if it's a losing hand. Power it back up, draw again... repeat until a winning hand shows. Yeah, it really happens. | |
| Nov 3, 2013 at 9:45 | comment | added | ChrisW | @DanHaynes I don't understand your "The reason is simple": IMO to simulate roulette you should to be random, and leave it to chance whether any given number eventually turns up; and to simulate poker, you should randomly select from the deck of remaining cards. | |
| Jan 3, 2013 at 22:04 | comment | added | Dan Haynes | The RNGs are, as far as I know, all linear congruential RNGs. The RNG must also preserve its state across power outages/resets. The reason is simple - you don't just need random numbers, you need to guarantee that every number will eventually turn up. Linear congruential generators have that characteristic. If some numbers might not occur in the sequence, those values may correspond to the range of values that produce a top-tier win on the game, which would invalidate the pay tables. | |
| Apr 21, 2012 at 1:32 | comment | added | Konrad Rudolph |
@Rory Are you sure about this? Why would modern casinos not use real RNGs? Such devices are cheap enough, and even normal computers can produce non-predictable random numbers (/dev/random on Unix …) using several sources of environmental noise from device drivers. Either way, the non-timed speed requirement is unnecessary.
|
|
| Apr 15, 2012 at 22:42 | vote | accept | going | ||
| Apr 13, 2012 at 8:01 | comment | added | Rory Alsop | @xiaohouzi79 - If you can time the updates, you can predict future numbers, as the RNG is really a pseudo RNG, thus allowing a player to improve his/her odds. | |
| Apr 13, 2012 at 5:44 | comment | added | Oddthinking♦ | Possibly in response to Michael Larsen on Press Your Luck? Longer, better-told version by This American Life (Act IV). | |
| Apr 13, 2012 at 5:32 | comment | added | going | Would be interested to know why this is necessary: "at a speed that cannot be timed by the player". Surely that sucker flies (randomly not cycling 1,2,3,4) at phenomenal pace, not repeating itself at regular intervals? | |
| Apr 13, 2012 at 4:41 | history | answered | Oddthinking♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |