61–70 of 123 posts
"Gravity's Rainbow", by Thomas Pynchon, has an extended section about the Poisson distribution as applied to falling bombs, maternity wards, etc.: http://books.google.com/books?id=GGPm4I3BbxAC&pg=PT194&#... (possibly NSFW)
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This is actually an important lesson for game designers. Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random. For example, there's an expansion to The Settlers of Catan that lets you use cards instead of dice to ensure a nice smooth distribution of resources... I think it's a lot more fun!
I can think of two specific examples where breaking the rules of probability resulted in better player experience: In tf2, you randomly get weapon drops, up to a limit per week. The initial obvious solution was to randomly roll if they get a new weapon every X minutes of gameplay. This lead to players getting long unlucky streaks where they got little to no gameplay. They eventually changed it to when you get a weapo…
In quantum mechanics, if you measure two incompatible observables (like position and momentum) of a system, and then repeat that experiment many times, you will get two lists of real numbers. QM says you can predict the distribution of these numbers, but you cannot predict the individual numbers themselves. The popular way of thinking nowadays is that "the universe is just inherently random".
So I posed the question on the Physics Stack Exchange: how do we know these numbers are truly random, and not the result of some as-yet-undiscovered pseudorandom number generator that is nonetheless deterministic? Luboš Motl (Czech string theorist) replied (a bit abrasively I might add) that yes, the numbers are truly random and plenty of experiments have ruled out the loopholes. Now, there's no way to determine if a set of numbers are truly random, so how he made this bold matter-of-fact statement is beyond me.
Einstein initially believed in "hidden variable" theories, undiscovered properties of quantum systems. Most of these have been ruled out by experiment (this is what Lubos mentioned), but really, this doesn't apply at all to my question of whether those numbers are random or not. Superdeterminism seems to still allow non-randomness, but for some reason, most physicists (notably excepting Gerard t'Hooft) have discounted superdeterminism as nonsense.
I'm a bit confused. What is this notion of "pure randomness" that this article and many comments seem to be eluding to? Perhaps I'm just not using the same definitions of terms, but I thought a uniform distribution is still considered random.
> Perhaps I'm just not using the same definitions of terms, but I thought a uniform distribution is still considered random. No, a uniform distribution is not evidence of randomness. Consider the digits 0 - 9 repeated endlessly: 0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 ... Uniformly distributed? Yes. Random? No. > What is this notion of "pure randomness" tha…
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This is actually an important lesson for game designers. Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random. For example, there's an expansion to The Settlers of Catan that lets you use cards instead of dice to ensure a nice smooth distribution of resources... I think it's a lot more fun!
I can think of two specific examples where breaking the rules of probability resulted in better player experience: In tf2, you randomly get weapon drops, up to a limit per week. The initial obvious solution was to randomly roll if they get a new weapon every X minutes of gameplay. This lead to players getting long unlucky streaks where they got little to no gameplay. They eventually changed it to when you get a weapo…
This is a (persistent) myth. None of the Civilization games actually do this. Civilization 4 is the only game in the series that displays combat prediction as a percentage chance, and the source code for Civ 4's combat engine is publicly released and well understood. (I am a developer on a Civ 4 modding project and familiar with the code.) The earlier Civ games before 4 don't display any kind of combat odds, and Civ 5 has a totally different system that isn't based on winning percentage. So, unless you're talking about some other game like Galactic Civilizations or a mod for Civilization 4, this isn't true.
Your underlying point is certainly true, though: gameplay often is perceived as a better experience with "randomness" smoothed out to produce more uniformly distributed results.
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Oh yes. Our intuition is that random is fair and uniform, but it's absolutely not. I was bit by another random quirk in World of Warcraft. There was a long-running achievement called "What a Strange Long Journey it has Been", which took at least a year in real-time to complete, and you had to actively play during each of the ten or so in-game festivals and holidays, and do some quests and tasks during each. If you mi…
So, I did a quick bit of math. You can pull one piece every hour for two weeks, but sleeping, not playing, missing days etc, meant that I effectively pulled ~100 pieces. The chance of missing a certain piece is 7/8, so missing a certain piece 100 times in a row is (7/8)^100, which is roughly a little bit more than one in a million. The chance of failure would be 8 times that much because there are 8 pieces you could…
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So, I did a quick bit of math. You can pull one piece every hour for two weeks, but sleeping, not playing, missing days etc, meant that I effectively pulled ~100 pieces. The chance of missing a certain piece is 7/8, so missing a certain piece 100 times in a row is (7/8)^100, which is roughly a little bit more than one in a million. The chance of failure would be 8 times that much because there are 8 pieces you could…
You couldn't possibly miss all 8 pieces. As soon as you make one attempt you'll get one piece.
Back in the day I was in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. And back then, each boss monster in a raid dungeon had a loot table, and when you killed it, your raid got a few pieces of random loot. And I don't know how many times I, and the other guy in the guild who understood statistics, had to explain to the others that random doesn't mean uniform. If a certain piece of armour has a 1/X chance to drop from a boss…
This is actually an important lesson for game designers. Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random. For example, there's an expansion to The Settlers of Catan that lets you use cards instead of dice to ensure a nice smooth distribution of resources... I think it's a lot more fun!
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Here's a weird thing about randomness that has always bothered me: In quantum mechanics, if you measure two incompatible observables (like position and momentum) of a system, and then repeat that experiment many times, you will get two lists of real numbers. QM says you can predict the distribution of these numbers, but you cannot predict the individual numbers themselves. The popular way of thinking nowadays is that…
Maybe the issue is the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen problem: if the numbers are being generated deterministically, they're somehow being communicated superluminally between entangled particles, which implies that in some relativistic frames of reference they're being communicated into the past? I guess I should learn enough about QM to really understand this stuff instead of guessing.