What Do You Make Of This...Injuries

Awhile back there was an owner here who said "better" random number generators are very very expensive...knowing how tight as ship SOM runs I doubt they paid any big price, so it might be Hal asking his wife for a bunch of numbers each night. lol

I think there was collusion involved...

I think there was collusion involved...

I was not shocked to see strep throat get into the very same arguments with almost an entirely different set of people on the 20xx forum.

Apparently he did not like Nev calling him an ass- which is what he claims was the reason he reported the other thread to be shut down. Its not possibly because he was upset at having been embarrassed...

but lets get back to these random number generated injuries...

Good random number generators are not necessarily expensive. There are many algorithms. Most are documented in various programming textbooks.

My favorite one years ago was the one Basic where you specified a first number or seed as it was called in my intro textbook. If you knew the seed you could know what the following series of "random" numbers would be. Next lesson was various techniques for creating that first seed value. One simple one I remember was to take the system time and manipulate it in some way. If I remember right the first one I wrote started with the square root of the seconds portion of the current system time. That made it difficult to guess that beginning number and make the resulting string appear truly random. I assume the logic used the built in random function of modern compilers is much more complicated than that.

Bottom line is the random function is provided free by most every computer language as just one of the commands. They no longer need a seed and whatever that logic is underneath is concealed from the programmer. So it is not really a function of how much strat was or was not willing to pay for the random number generator they use.

Valen,

That might be how it is now or even as far back as a dozen years ago, but SOM is probably still using their first random generator, and that is dinosaur old.

1

From the Wikipedia page on Random number generation (my emphasis):

By humans

Random number generation may also be done by humans directly. However, most studies find that human subjects have some degree of nonrandomness when generating a random sequence of, e.g., digits or letters. They may alternate too much between choices compared to a good random generator.[9]

To me this means humans don't repeat choices often enough to be truly random.

This disproves the "Richman's wife theory" based on the multiple injuries to the same player that people have posted

I think there was collusion involved...

I was not shocked to see strep throat get into the very same arguments with almost an entirely different set of people on the 20xx forum.

Apparently he did not like Nev calling him an ass- which is what he claims was the reason he reported the other thread to be shut down. Its not possibly because he was upset at having been embarrassed...

but lets get back to these random number generated injuries...

Went to the 2000 forums, since I don't play that set it was my first visit. I didn't see his posts, but did see all the replies. He's far too predictable, but not funny enough anymore.

He can claim the Throne of Locked Threads, who would object?