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17. May 2009, 12:30:17
playBunny 
Subject: Re: Dice study
playBunny: Further to my "not sure there's a hard way", there are several steps.

** First get a lot of matches. That's a fair challenge in itself.

** Unless Fencer has fixed the .mat export bug which makes multi-game match files useless, you'd need to run each match file through a script that would fix the error.

** Run the matches through another program that will extract the dice rolls.

** Do your analyses. Here it's very much a question of how complex you want it - whether you want to look at dice independantly of the games, ie. just streams of rolls, or whether you want to know about dice in relation to the players and positions. The latter would be a considerable adventure in programming.

17. May 2009, 14:40:04
Czuch 
Subject: Re: Dice study
playBunny: What about dice rolls in relationship to the time? For example, if 10 different people were to make a roll in different games all at the exact same time, would there be any type of correlation, IE would they all have the same dice rolled, or a higher rate of this?


I know it seems like sometimes I will log on and play a few quick moves, and it seems more often than random that I make the same roll in all the games....


Also, I think I remember being told that in casinos, the video and or slot machines give any specific result on one play, based on the exact time that you pull the lever or hit the play button? Something like all the potential outcomes are spinning around in the machine, and which outcome you get is based purely on the timing of when you hit play?

17. May 2009, 14:50:39
playBunny 
Subject: Re: Dice study
Czuch: Whenever someone says "it seems more often than random that ..." about a random process it seems more often than not that it's their brain seeming things and not the random process.

Without knowing how BrainKing's dice are generated I can say nothing with certainty about the rolls, however, as I see absolutely no benefit to Fencer or the players in having every dice generated according to the clock it would surprise me greatly if it were the case.

But it's moot anyway because there's no way for us to determine the timing of dice events.

17. May 2009, 14:57:36
Czuch 
Subject: Re: Dice study
playBunny: Yeah, I know... it was just a recent 3 day period where I logged on and my first three games each day all had the same dice roll ( not the same roll all 9 games, but the same one for 3 games each day)


We do not know when the dice rolls are generated, is that it?

For awhile, I thought it was when the player actually clicked to see the game for the first time after it was their turn again. But then it seemed like it was generated right after the opponent made their move, but was only revealed when the next player came to see it?

You are right, there is no way to know for sure, except ask Fencer?

17. May 2009, 16:07:37
CryingLoser 
Subject: Re: Dice study
Czuch:
There is a way, but a *very* hard one: The random numbers generators in programming languages are implemented as a function modulo m (for us with unknown m), in the simplest such random function there is a start number s, and the random numbers r1, r2, etc. are generated as s mod m =3 etc. There exist math proofs that random generators that include the modulo
function, even if they are not so simple as the one before, are always cyclical, i.e. after some thousand random numbers r1, r2, ..., rx they start from the beginning.
So if you play some very slow dice game like Anti Backgammon with a friend and the goal of both, not to win but to count the dice numbers, you may find out
a repating sequence of about 5000 - 6000 numbers. And
in a real game you can after 4 - 5 moves guess the next "random number". (Have not tested it, would be too hard effort just for winning some games...)

17. May 2009, 21:17:15
alanback 
Subject: Re: Dice study
CryingLoser:Are you assuming there is a separate incidence of the random number generator for each game?  I think that is very unlikely, and that it is more likely that the same RNG is used for all games on the site.  This would make it impossible for two players to anticipate any cyclical result.

17. May 2009, 21:36:10
CryingLoser 
Subject: Re: Dice study
alanback:
Yes, the assumption was that the generator has for each game a new initialisation. As you mentioned, there is also a second way possible, just one RNG for all games.
And only this second way is the right one - if Fencer implemented his RNG according to the first way, then
sooner or later somebody will count the cycle of the numbers...

17. May 2009, 23:59:01
playBunny 
Subject: Re: Dice study
CryingLoser: if Fencer implemented his RNG according to the first way, then
sooner or later somebody will count the cycle of the numbers...


Er, how "later" can your scale go?!

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