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Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

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Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#91

Post by cestith »

drewrv wrote: post #15
ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

This is also an example of users saying they want one thing (randomness) when really they want something else (variety).

Shuffle and weighted random both give a better chance of variety than truly random. Shuffle is cheaper to calculate in terms of storage space.

The article is about weighting randomness based on past distribution. In a music playlist that may be enough. Some user might also want a term in the equation that weights songs they've rated highly to be favored over lower-rated or unrated songs.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#93

Post by munificent »

ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

This is called "sampling without replacement" and lines up with the physical intuition users have for taking a playlist where each song appears once, randomly reordering it, and then playing the entire playlist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_random_sample

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#94

Post by pkulak »

laumars wrote: post #37
ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

Many music players have done this for a long time. In fact I believe that's part of the reason why they refer to that function as "shuffle" rather than "random"

But even a pure shuffle isn't enough, since you're likely to get the same artist many times in a row, which bothers people.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#95

Post by WorldMaker »

Pfhreak wrote: post #4

Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..." Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback! But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful…

In hobby time I have been exploring the storytelling possibility space of RPGs using card decks. I love playing cards and I love custom playing card designs and I wish there was more impetus for players to bring decks with interesting designs to an RPG table in the same way that dice are so varied and fun to see what people bring to a table.

I think there are interesting stories to tell in an RPG where you know the "weight" of your rolls, approximately how many "success" cards you have left, some choice in what you play from your hand.

«But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful.»

It depends on how personal you take it in how awful it feels. If the goal is to create an interesting story, a grand sequence of failures can be a very interesting story. Look at Fiasco, for instance, where some of the fun can be very explicitly "how do I make my character more miserable?" In those cases where you know you are about to hit a lot of failures in die rolls/card draws you can lean in to it. Try to explain why your character is having such awful luck, for instance. Maybe try to set up an elaborate Rube Goldberg design of failures that eventually cascade into the weirdest, grandest success, like a "drunken master" kung fu ballet.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#96

Post by lawtguy »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #39

This reminds me of Sid Meier's talk at GDC about having to game the random number system because of player's expectations: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012186/The-Psychology-of-Game-... More often than not, true RNG in game design takes a back seat to fun.

The MMO City of Heroes did something similar to this. They called it the streak breaker: http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Attack_Mechanics#The_Stre...

Basically, the higher your chance to hit with an attack was, the the sooner it would break a streak of misses and force a hit. This is definitely not random, but seems to be more satisfying to the player. Plus it no doubt cuts down on the number of complaints on the forums about "unfair" RNG.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#97

Post by BurningFrog »

ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

With these dice it's still possible you get the same song twice in a row, just less so.

A simpler system is picking a random song, but excluding the last 20 songs played.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#98

Post by colanderman »

A simpler (albeit quite deterministic) way of accomplishing this is to use an LFSR [1] or the CRC [2] of an incrementing counter. Such a sequence of values "looks random" under many measures but also has the probability that you will eventually get an even distribution of values (after the period of the counter).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear-feedback_shift_register

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#100

Post by koolba »

ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

A simpler way that's guaranteed to not repeat a song till the entire set has been played is: Assuming you have N songs, pick a prime P such that N is not divisible by P. Then pick a random index I (0 Another method is to pick a random key K and sort the entries of the playlist based on HMAC(SONG, K) (where SONG is the name or other identifier of the song). This has a number of interesting properties. For starters the playlist will be randomized (that's good). It will also keep it's overall order if a new song is added. The new song will get inserted based upon its HMAC. You can switch things up a bit by having K be a based on the current date. That way new songs will maintain their order and jumping to a track on a given day will continue the chain as before, but day to day you won't always hear the same tracks back to back.
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