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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

#231

Post by accountyaccount »

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…

they don't want a random playlist, they want all the music on the playlist played in a random order w/ no repeats

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

#232

Post by cableshaft »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #213
cableshaft wrote: post #44

There was an old flash video game I worked on a long time ago where I did exactly this. I had a boss with two main attacks, and I didn't want it to be super predictable A/B/A/B, so I had it pick between A and B randomly, then reweight the probabilities, so if it picked A, instead of 50% A, 50% B it'd now be 25% A, 75% B. If it picked A again it'd be down to like 12.5% A, 87.5% B. If B then got chosen, it'd flip flop…

Hmm, but by the algorithm you describe you are MORE likely to get a "super predictable" a/b/a/b than you would with just an independently random coin flip each time. That is, strings of multiple As or Bs in a row is less likely with your algorithm, but you make it sound like that's what you wanted.

No, you misunderstand. I didn't want it to be always A,B,A,B, but I also didn't want it to be an even coin flip and risk an A,A,A,A,A,A,A or whatever (like in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead).

With my method, it was possible for the same move to be picked 2 or 3 times in a row, but it mostly went back and forth, so the player was definitely going to encounter both moves, but they couldn't know for absolute certain which move the next one would be (and they both needed you to kind of quickly get into different positions before getting hit).

The type of pattern you'd usually get with mine was more like A,B,B,A,A,B,A,B,A,A,A,B,B,A.

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

#233

Post by hammock »

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…

The iTunes shuffle program is(was?) known buggy, where it's not actually random but will repeat the same order again and again.

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

#234

Post by pbhjpbhj »

speeder wrote: post #164
acomjean wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about rolling 2D6, is the distribution isn't even. I'm not sure that factors into the game (have played but its been a while). Cards seem like a more controlled way to distribute the results with some randomness. only one way to get a 12 (6+6) but 7 much more likely.. (6+1, 5+2, 4+3, 3+4, 2+5, 1+6) as someone who played a bit of online backgammon back in the day, We always suspected the random dice rolls be…

Catan cards take that in account. They basically made one card for each possiblity of pair of dices, so there is a 7 card for 6+1, another for 5+2, and so on... Playing with it is MUCH better than with dice... when I played with the dice that came with my copy with catan, the dice were clearly defective (rolls weren't just random-looking, they were WILDLY wrong, it rolled 10s 2 times the amount of 7s...), and the gam…

In Catan can't you trade any 4 identical resources for any one other resource? It slows down resource acquisition but should eliminate the situation you describe!?

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

#235

Post by pbhjpbhj »

default-kramer wrote: post #163
pmiller2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a little disappointed when I clicked, too. I can't think of a way you could make physical dice like that, unless maybe the faces were LEDs? That might be too fragile.

Put 6 weights in the die, one per face. A mechanism controls each weight individually, moving it from near the face (likely to land down) to near the center (likely to land up). Combine it with something that can detect roll outcomes. This would probably cost a lot of money to fit in a normal sized die.

Why not have an electromagnet at each face and ball-bearing in a 3 way race. You weight the device by turning on the opposite number's coil. You don't guarantee a particular roll but the statistical weighting should be pretty strong.

I wonder if you tuned the e-m coil for a particular frequency if you could make the device passive and weight it using an external frequency change?

Or use computer vision, a passive dice with a metal insert and a magnetic table; switch on the magnet when the dice hits the table right (this version would be highly obvious but perhaps could be made less so).

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

#236

Post by robotresearcher »

abritinthebay wrote: post #222
robotresearcher wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we replace the dice with Schrödinger's cat?

Then we’re dealing with a very different thing and the conversation is therefore different?

> Theoretically all physical processes are predictable, but in practice there is a limit.

So you defined away quantum effects as 'not physical', which most people would not agree with. How do feel about the theoretical limits on measurement accuracy that also negate your claim?

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

#237

Post by speeder »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #234
speeder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catan cards take that in account. They basically made one card for each possiblity of pair of dices, so there is a 7 card for 6+1, another for 5+2, and so on... Playing with it is MUCH better than with dice... when I played with the dice that came with my copy with catan, the dice were clearly defective (rolls weren't just random-looking, they were WILDLY wrong, it rolled 10s 2 times the amount of 7s...), and the gam…

In Catan can't you trade any 4 identical resources for any one other resource? It slows down resource acquisition but should eliminate the situation you describe!?

You can, but if I remember the resource noone had was bricks, that is very important...

So the game pace slowed to a crawl... Also, the funky dice never rolling bricks meant people would quickly rack up random resources, sometimes like 3 of each, so they ended with 9 cards, and would then lose to robber rolls (7).

Then of course in one game where this happened there was an asshole cousin that thought it would be hilarious to hog resources and make the game worse, he would spend his whole turn making 'negotiations' with everyone, and them cancelling them, wasting like 5 minutes every time it was his turn, and sometimes if 7 was taking long enough have 20 cards on his hand...

We don't play with that cousin anymore either.

But yeah, not having a way to build roads make the game suuuuuper slow.

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

#238

Post by oliv__ »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #188
rcthompson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're solving the wrong problem here. The goal is not to take a list and shuffle it once. That's trivial. The goal is: given a set of N songs, sample an arbitrarily long sequence of songs with replacement from this set such that the sequence "feels" random. Things that are random but don't "feel random" include: playing the same song too often, not playing a song often enough, and repeating the same sub-sequ…

Also: - don't play too many songs from the same artist in a row (and too many is probably 2) - don't play too many slow/fast/sad/angry/... songs in a row - ... instruments - ... genres - ... "feel" - ... Deep AI is definitely needed to create playlists that "feel random". :)

I don't see how this requires "deep AI". Aren't songs already categorized by their contents?

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

#239

Post by Tarq0n »

nkrisc wrote: post #54
drewrv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great example of finding what users really want as opposed to what they say they want.

This sounds like a giant strawman to me. Where do programmers get the idea that a mode called 'shuffle' would call for sampling with replacement? The obvious software analogy to shuffling would be re-ordering a list randomly, not randomly drawing from a list.

I think this whole shuffling meme started with Spotify's engineers misunderstanding what they were asked to do, then claiming their customers don't know what they want when they obviously delivered the wrong feature.

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

#240

Post by wpietri »

ianamartin wrote: post #218
wpietri wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for those who are really in to this topic, Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" is great. There's a section on how financial traders often end up ranked like this. Somebody makes an effectively random bet, but it pays off big so they're treated as a genius. It made me see all sorts of organizations differently.

Taleb is the Deepak Chopra of Economics and Probability. What he says sounds really important, but is mostly a bunch of horseshit.

The guy spent years as a trader. I spent a few years working for traders. I think his analysis of the sociology and psychology of trading was spot on. That's the main content of this book, so I'm still comfortable recommending it even if he doesn't meet your standards elsewhere.
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