pgt:I think it's the answer to a riddle my father used to ask:

If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how far must a raindrop fall to split a shingle?

playBunny: It's absolutely clear to me. We should not be eating the eggs of battery hens.

gogul: I haven't a clue what you're talking about.

playBunny: To renounce not only on atomic bombs, but atomic power as well..

A strong CPU is pointless in anyones home.

gogul: Why not using online computing power capacity?

What for?

playBunny: 'My 3.0 GHz AMD'

Why not using online computing power capacity?

Isn't there a nonsense board or something for this kind of thing?

gogul: I'm glad that mine was a hint. Yours arouses curiosity. It's more of a riddle!

playBunny: if we don't mind the stones from the sky anymore, there is still the fire under the roof. Thank you, yours was a hint.

Bwild: I'd like to talk with Cheney immediatly. Can I?

Or will he give me a clout just for asking?

gogul: I prefer italian meatballs, which during the stoneage , were made from pterasaurs

alanback: it's a bit like italian football.

gogul:This whole discussion is just pterrible!

playBunny: I have to let that fall. If I'd ever been high this could tell me that pterasaurs 'peut-être' droped petas (stones if Internet was correct)!

gogul: Did you know that the recycling of tetrapacks to roof tiles is a Brazil innovation?

That would be have been good protection against the droppings of ptetrasaurs, which inhabited Brazil up to about 70 million years ago.

paully: Did you know that the recycling of tetrapacks to roof tiles is a Brazil innovation? :)

alanback: I think that model glows in the dark, blue and red

Thad:Yes, I believe a tetrahertz is a rented fish. ;-)

Thad: ah. Mega, giga, tera, peta ...

gogul: Shouldn't it be 'terahertz'?

Nice infos about power and outcome. As the keyword Tetrahertz gives less than 100 results with google (german), I'm guessing that you'll muddle on for a while like it is now.

AlliumCepa: A millisecond is a long time for a modern computer. My 3.0 GHz AMD can produce over 250,000 dice rolls per second using a very basic formula (although it doesn't do anything further with the dice).

But for online backgammon you need to take into acount the context in which the dice roll occurs. There's an html page to be generated for each dice roll. Fencer fills each game page with loads of information, some of which requires access to the database. I think that 1 page per millisecond would be impressive even for a server written in Java.

gogul: yes, it can. Modern CPUs use GHz to measure their speed.
1 GHz = 1'000'000'000 Hz
1 millisecond = 1/1000'000 of the second.
the answer to you question is: in the same millisecond, a CPU could do 1000 calculations. I our case, it could roll 1000 dice (thank you, grenv).

grenv: no need to be picky. Spelling mistake fixed, thanks. Or rather "thank you"

paully: probably not.

Czuch: True. Can it proceed several things in the same millisecond or would that just be fast. One for a pc geek.

AlliumCepa: dices? like a salad?

Why all this talk about the randomness of the dice? There appears to be no evidence that it isn't.

AlliumCepa: do they smell like napalm?

Czuch: You know what they say: "I love the smell of dice in the morning"

Czuch:This is probably also true with physical dice  :-)

So... from what i read of the discussion on the BK board, it seems like the dice might be contingent upon the exact timing of when it is rolled, or am I misunderstanding still?

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?!

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...

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.

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...)

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?

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.

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?

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.

AlliumCepa: I *think* that they're trying to find some means of analyzing the rolls themselves--in isolation--apart from the way they might be used in backgammon.  I suspect there are (or were, a while ago) some fairly regular departures from randomness in the routine(s) that govern the rolls here.  But analyzing and demonstrating that would have been difficult.

Thad: I am not sure what exactly you wish to analyze, but GNU Backgammon has some roll out capabilities. Plus, it can be run in "Tutor" mode as far as I remember.

Thad: Hmmm, you say "easy"... ... I'm not even sure that there's a hard way!

Is there an easy way to pull all the dice rolls and analyze them? I *NOT* accusing Brainking of doing anything wrong, I just think some of us math geeks might have fun seeing the results.

paully: Even so, I think every backgammon player has occasionally felt very badly used by the dice :-)  It doesn't always help to know that even a perfectly random system can (indeed, must occasionally) mimic the behaviour of a malevolent demon!

"GERRY": Oh no, it isn't bad luck at all. Obviously you have been singled out and Fencer has written a specialized script that activates in any games you play, looks to see what dice will best suit your opponent and would least suit you, and the script automatically plays those selections.

Well, that was kind of a joke just to illustrate how ridiculous it is to suggest the dice are anything other than random

LOL it seem's very odd when you play backgammon your opponent get's all the doubles at the end when you need them & when i play anti backgammon i get them when i don't need them LOL I guess it's just bad luck hey

Vikings: Thanks for clearing that up! I, for some reason, misunderstood a backgammon as being when the other player still had pieces outside of their home base before you got all your off. That aside, the scoring did initally give me one point but that later chenged to 2. Thanks folks for helping out!!

Anjil: no bug, your opponent got all of his pieces out of your home so you did not score a backgammon, but he did not get any pieces off so the score is a gammon which is worth 2 points

alanback: Oh!! .. is this a bug with the scoring?

Anjil:  Also, you did not score a backgammon (3 pts), you scored a gammon (2 pts)