111–120 of 243 posts
> These accusations would come up even though they (all being computer science majors) know it's possible (although unlikely) for these events to happen. They just don't trust the black box.
I am reminded of the approach that GamesByEmail.com used to address this criticism: http://www.gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
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…
I manually shuffle some playlists now. One nice thing about the desktop client is the clipboard integration. You can press cmd+a to highlight all the songs, cmd+c to copy, and then paste all the song URLs into a text editor. Then I used "permute lines" in Sublime Text to shuffle them, then cmd+c and cmd+v to paste the songs back into Spotify.
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Apple has a patent[0] for a fall-protection system that will rotate the phone while it's in the air. If something like that could be made small enough to fit into a die, that would work. The biggest challenge will probably be the power supply. I'm sure that a processor, accelerometer, and the Taptic Engine (the thing that provides vibration and haptic feedback in Apple devices) are all small enough to fit in a typica…
Oh my god, you totally could use reaction wheels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y
I've designed a few loot tables and the Gambler's Fallacy is a criticism I often have to deal with when people don't understand why a given item hasn't dropped despite them having killed a mob enough times to statistically warrant it.
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You could just use a deck of cards with numbers on them. That's the simplest way to do "Gambler's Fallacy Dice" IRL. For example, there's a popular Catan expansion pack that replaces the dice with a deck of cards with numbers on them for just this reason, because in Catan each roll of 2D6 represents different regions of the map paying out so if a number never comes up it never pays out.
I've never played in real life with the deck, but I first came across this version on a software version of Catan I had (I think Xbox?). I really enjoyed it and my guess is that in real life it adds a substantial angle to negotiating placement of the robber. In particular, bribing people to put/not put the robber in a given location - if the deck is 7-heavy or your good squares are already drawn, no big deal.
There's a probability model called the Pólya urn where you imagine an urns containing numbered balls (colored balls in a typical example, but to draw the comparison with dice we can say they're numbered 1-6), and every time you draw a ball of a certain color, you put back more balls according to some rule. A few probability distributions can be expressed in terms of a Pólya urn, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3…
There's a probability model called the Pólya urn where you imagine an urns containing numbered balls (colored balls in a typical example, but to draw the comparison with dice we can say they're numbered 1-6), and every time you draw a ball of a certain color, you put back more balls according to some rule. A few probability distributions can be expressed in terms of a Pólya urn, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3…
Thank you! Sometimes the hardest thing is knowing what to google!