Maybe they use their own random number generator. https://xkcd.com/221/
How random is xkcd? (2015)
91–100 of 133 posts
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're talking about ratios of unit-strength, which correlate directly to odds of success in a battle, not to numbers-of-units or anything more fuzzy like that. Given which, 20:10 and 2:1 have identical odds of success.
Do they, though? It depends on how the combat works. Suppose, for example, that each side has 5 hit points, and repeatedly you roll a 2:1 die to decide who gets 1 point of damage, until one side reaches 0 hit points. The chance of an "upset", where the weaker side wins, is not 1/3; I compute it to be roughly 14%. If both sides start with 10 hit points, I compute the chance of an upset to be 6.5%. The law of large num…
Sure, you could design a system where it's more complicated, but Sid Meier didn't. In the video he's talking about Civilization Revolutions, in which combat is just "attacker's Attack stat vs defender's Defense stat" to form a probability-of-success, which is then rolled to see who won the battle. There's no hit points or anything like that, just those stats.
More than "players don't understand math", this might be a UI or tutorialization issue. I.e. presumably it was unintuitive because people imagined more complicated ways it might be working behind the scenes, causing large absolute stat-disparities to feel like they should work differently despite being in similar ratios. It's a case where showing an explicit odds-of-success display might have helped, though XCom famously showed how that can backfire...
(Revolutions was a deliberate simplification of the Civ formula, so they could try to appeal to console / mobile gamers rather than the traditional hardcore PC audience.)
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Player psychology has absolutely nothing to do with rational thought ... the attacking unit has a strength of 1.5, and the defending unit has a strength of 0.5. So the attacking unit should win 3 times for every 1 time the defending unit wins. It's 3:1. That's just math. That's what the math says." Wow, I liked Sid Meyer a lot more before I listened to that arrogant diatribe about how stupid his players are and abou…
Hey friend. He's not saying they're stupid. He's saying they're irrational. And he's right. Humans aren't rational beings and our expectations differ from simple mathematical probabilities. When making Civilization 3 in the years leading up to 2001, his team had to make changes to the game so that it felt better to the players. They improved game design as you say that they should have, but made it an internal change…
> He's saying they're irrational. And he's right.
No, he's not right. Humans only seem irrational when you myopically narrow your focus to one or two axes. This is something "smart" people do all the time: they're smart in one way, so everyone who acts in any way counter to what looks optimal from that narrow, simplified model is acting "irrationally". Economists will call humans irrational, but it's actually their over-simplified models that suck. Sid Meyer will call his players irrational, but it's actually his (originally) lame combat system that sucks. Rich MBAs will call lifelong employees irrational for not starting their own businesses, but they're ignoring a thousand factors that they took for granted. The people they are denigrating are incorporating more axes, more information, more context than their silly little models are.
There's a story I wish I could find about a young boy in India trying to answer his dad's math problems. His dad asks him questions like "A man wants 5 mangoes from a shopkeeper who is selling them for $4 each. How much money will he spend?" and gets increasingly exasperated that his child can't answer. But we see the child's inner thoughts, with things like "why would he spend $4 at this shopkeeper when they usually cost $2? Can't he just walk to a different shop and get them there? And what is he going to do with FIVE mangoes? He won't be able to use them all before they spoil!" etc. etc. Sid Meyer is the dad assuming his players are stupid (sorry, "irrational", meaning: stupid, losers, dumb, idiots, morons). They're not.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a really good article from Spotify Engineering that looks at exactly how Spotify bridged this gap between “random” and the “random” people actually expect. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... It a good read on understanding what people generally expect when they ask for a random stream of songs (or comics), and how you can meet that expectation by carefully engineering how you gene…
I believe this issue is pre-dated even further, back when iPod users didn't like that occasionally a random shuffle would play the same song back-to-back. So the 'random' shuffle was made a bit less random.
I think the issue was playing the same artist or album back-to-back. So they made ‘smart shuffle’ in 2005.
(https://www.wired.com/story/requiem-for-the-ipod-shuffle/)
A shuffle already implies shuffling like a deck of cards, so you wouldn’t get duplicates unless you had two of the same card, and I that’s how it was described in the manual.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they, though? It depends on how the combat works. Suppose, for example, that each side has 5 hit points, and repeatedly you roll a 2:1 die to decide who gets 1 point of damage, until one side reaches 0 hit points. The chance of an "upset", where the weaker side wins, is not 1/3; I compute it to be roughly 14%. If both sides start with 10 hit points, I compute the chance of an upset to be 6.5%. The law of large num…
Sure, you could design a system where it's more complicated, but Sid Meier didn't. In the video he's talking about Civilization Revolutions, in which combat is just "attacker's Attack stat vs defender's Defense stat" to form a probability-of-success, which is then rolled to see who won the battle. There's no hit points or anything like that, just those stats. More than "players don't understand math", this might be a…
> presumably it was unintuitive because people imagined more complicated ways it might be working behind the scenes
I think this is exactly it. And then Sid Meyer calls his players stupid and irrational for assuming the game had more depth than it actually had. For assuming a celebrated game designer would put even a modicum of thought into making a combat system that was balanced, made sense, and felt good.
It's like selling a gallium spoon and then calling people stupid when it melted in their soups. Sure, if you know a lot about gallium, you wouldn't be so stupid and irrational as to put it in your hot soup. But it's a metal spoon that you bought from a reputable vendor. Spoons go in soup. They were being completely rational; it's just that they were tricked into assuming a product was less crappy than it actually was.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#96Kind of an aside to the nerd sniping happening here, but I think the fact that people complain about the random button is a sign that the feature isn’t doing what those people really want, even if it is doing what is advertised. Those people _want_ a button biased to return novel ones they haven’t read either in that session or across all time somehow, likely because they are using it to discover new comics.
If XKCD would not be able to have a feature which is technically but not socially correct, then what webcomic may? The people who learn that random(uncorrelated) is what it is and not what they want are part of today's lucky 10'000
Indeed, if I were running that site, I would now implement the ability to turn on intentional non-randomness for _specific people_, and begin embedding messages in the sequences of comics, or selecting the same two comics 28 times in a row on occasion. Heck, stick the referrer in the session and give everyone coming in from _that blog post_ wildly divergent randomness characteristics :-)
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#97I remember hearing Apple had to make a "random-seeming to humans" algorithm with the iPod's shuffle feature as well for the same reason. Grabbing a truly random song every play doesn't feel random to humans. What people really want with their song shuffle is something new they haven't played in a while.
I think it's gone now, but older versions of iTunes had a "randomness" slider that ranged from truly random to a biased randomness that "felt" more random by avoiding recently chosen songs/albums
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#98> a random stream of bits should have almost as many ones as zeros almost ??
If a random streams length is odd, they'll never be the exact same.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just from reading the article you can see how bad it is, and it makes sense that it would be worse for larger playlists. They've completely discounted the fact that when you play large playlists, you don't listen to the whole thing. The problem with the dithering comparison is that in dithering, you're looking at the whole image at the same time. But nobody listens to a long playlist all at once. First of all, the co…
I think you're onto something here. Spotify already saves various metadata about the musical qualities of songs like how "upbeat" it is or how much it "slaps". I'm imagining some kind of K- farthest -neighbors algorithm could make it so that you're constantly being given songs that are as different as possible from the recent ones you've listened to. I dunno, I'm not very well versed in algorithms yet, maybe that wou…
I don't even understand the goal here. My playlists are built up around topics and themes - most songs in playlists I build are going to be not very different.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Random is random, shuffle is shuffle. They are different things.
"Random" doesn't necessarily mean "uniformly distributed random." Shuffling a deck of cards randomly is random, but you're not going to get the same card twice in a row, or even the same card twice until you go through the whole deck.
Do you re-shuffle after the deck is exhausted, or after every hand? It's not excessively unusual to be dealt the same card twice in two consecutive hands.