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How random is xkcd? (2015)

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Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#101

Post by tedunangst »

drc500free wrote: post #89
ketzo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man this is an awesome talk, thanks for linking! Quick excerpt: > The player said “I lost a 2:1 battle, and I get that, I know I should lose that sometimes.” > I said, okay, so what’s the problem? > He said “well, I lost a 20:10 battle — what’s up with that?! 20 is so much more than 10!”

It seems reasonable to assume that's it's instead something like 10 simultaneous 2:1 battles, and you need to win a majority of them. That's very different odds than a single 2:1 battle. He seems stuck on interpreting feedback through the lens of a linear-odds, one-shot model. The player feedback is that it shouldn't be linear, and there should be less randomness for larger numbers. That all makes sense to me... and…

What do you do when it's 15:7?

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#102

Post by hgomersall »

bumby wrote: post #78
avianlyric wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

It can be biased and still random.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#103

Post by Dylan16807 »

bumby wrote: post #78
avianlyric wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

You don't need to make it less random to achieve that. A 100% random shuffle won't have that issue, you just have to make sure it's actually a shuffle and not something else.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#104

Post by thrwggrdxvgf »

kelthan wrote: post #90
mattnewton wrote: post #3

Kind 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.

First off, let me give a shout out to the author of the article. It's quite well written with clear support for the answer he provides. Now back to the thread: It turns out that most people expect "random" to mean a random selection without duplication (at least until the source is exhausted). That is called a non-replacement randomization: once a song (or comic, or whatever), is played/displayed, that item is no lon…

> If they did, casinos and lotteries would be out of business

I think you misunderstand the reason many people gamble if you are so sure of this.

(But I agree people also don’t really “get” randomness).

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#105

Post by waterhouse »

feoren wrote: post #93
Arc_Orion wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

You might enjoy Gigerenzer's "Bias bias" paper. Discussed here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/07/14/gigerenzer...

Paper itself: https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/OpenAccessDownload/RBE...

Abstract: "Behavioral economics began with the intention of eliminating the psychological blind spot in rational choice theory and ended up portraying psychology as the study of irrationality. In its portrayal, people have systematic cognitive biases that are not only as persistent as visual illusions but also costly in real life—meaning that governmental paternalism is called upon to steer people with the help of “nudges.” These biases have since attained the status of truisms. In contrast, I show that such a view of human nature is tainted by a “bias bias,” the tendency to spot biases even when there are none. This may occur by failing to notice when small sample statistics differ from large sample statistics, mistaking people’s random error for systematic error, or confusing intelligent inferences with logical errors. Unknown to most economists, much of psychological research reveals a different portrayal, where people appear to have largely fine-tuned intuitions about chance, frequency, and framing. A systematic review of the literature shows little evidence that the alleged biases are potentially costly in terms of less health, wealth, or happiness. Getting rid of the bias bias is a precondition for psychology to play a positive role in economics."

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#106

Post by pxc »

feoren wrote: post #95
kemayo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

> I think this is exactly it. And then Sid Meyer calls his players stupid and irrational

I think this is overstating what Sid Meier says in the talk. His original goal was to make his simple combat stat system clear to users by describing its odds as odds conventionally are described.

> 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.

That's exactly what he did, through player testing! Through practice and player feedback seems to me like a perfectly reasonable way to uncover an intuitive notion of unit strength. It's not like he said 'they're odds, stupid! learn how to understand odds.'. He recognized that player intuition and fun was the real goal, and his team gradually made the combat system more sophisticated.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#107

Post by Dylan16807 »

Arc_Orion wrote: post #87
feoren wrote: post #58

Earlier 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 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.

He's right in that players are biased when it comes to rare player success versus rare player failure. He's not right that it's irrational to have different expectations from the "simple mathematical probabilities".

The simple math works when each side is trying to hit a single target that only needs to be hit once. It does not work for medium or large fights.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#108

Post by mark-r »

slfnflctd wrote: post #85
dylan604 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once tasked with creating a DVD game that was meant to randomly pick questions from its available pool. Learned lots of things about how unrandom random can be. On the lower end of DVD players, there was a stored list of values between 0 and maxInt that was randomized when created. Each call of the random function would just move the pointer to the next item in the list. This meant that it would essentially pla…

This reminds me of an mp3 CD player I had. I don't remember if the feature was called shuffle or random, but it played the same sequence of tracks every time. I could only fully enjoy it once per CD.

I had a CD player in my SUV that had the same problem. The only saving grace is that it could play mp3s from the CD, so I had mixes that had 100 songs on them.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#109

Post by Dylan16807 »

tedunangst wrote: post #101
drc500free wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems reasonable to assume that's it's instead something like 10 simultaneous 2:1 battles, and you need to win a majority of them. That's very different odds than a single 2:1 battle. He seems stuck on interpreting feedback through the lens of a linear-odds, one-shot model. The player feedback is that it shouldn't be linear, and there should be less randomness for larger numbers. That all makes sense to me... and…

What do you do when it's 15:7?

Then you probably want to calculate the attacks between two big blobs of units without separating them. But the result is still going to be "something like 7 simultaneous 2:1 battles", and not at all like 30% odds of upset.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#110

Post by feoren »

waterhouse wrote: post #105
feoren wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

You might enjoy Gigerenzer's "Bias bias" paper. Discussed here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/07/14/gigerenzer... Paper itself: https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/OpenAccessDownload/RBE... Abstract: "Behavioral economics began with the intention of eliminating the psychological blind spot in rational choice theory and ended up portraying psychology as the study of irrationality. In its portrayal, peo…

Thanks, that paper is arguing something very different from what I'm used to seeing so that alone makes it worth a look. It's nice to see that not everyone is taking it as a given that humans are irrational.
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