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What does randomness look like?

empiricalzeal.com

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Re: What does randomness look like?

#111

Post by ufo »

Too wrote: post #94
henrikschroder wrote: post #11

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…

That's interesting, because in WarCraft 3, by Blizzard, randomness is designed to be "fair". They use a special word for it but i can't remember it at the moment. For example, there are certain items that can give you a chance to blow a "critical hit" , a critical hit multiplies your damage with X. Say an item gives you 30% chance to do 2X damage. However, the randomness has memory and is designed to distribute the c…

I see most people refering to that as a Pseudorandom Distribution, although this is Dota terminology so I'm not 100% sure its the same word.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#112

Post by scott_s »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #83
baddox wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh yes. Our intuition is that random is fair and uniform, but it's absolutely not. But a uniform distribution is random, isn't it? This sort of phrasing is rampant in this thread, and I'm confused by it. How can a uniform distribution be considered non-random, or "less" random than another distribution?

Randomness is about having a uniform probability of results, but that does not translate into a uniform distribution of results, nor can it, because of the de-correlation between random results. Specifically, the chance of getting the same result multiple times is non-zero, and actually can be fairly high with a lot of samples, whereas the chance of duplicate results in a uniform distribution is zero. Read the articl…

Randomness is about having a uniform probability of results

Well, you're still assuming the colloquial definition of "random," which implies "uniformly random." Of course, we can have a random process that is not uniformly random.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#113

Post by [deleted] »

Xcelerate wrote: post #109
andrewcooke wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you expect to implement the "as-yet-undiscovered pseudorandom number generator" without any state ("hidden variables")?

I'm just an engineer, so I'm not actually trying to challenge accepted thinking. However, it is well known that any QM system can be simulated using a classical computer, with the penalty of exponential slowdown. Let's say that I have a hypothetical, ultra-powerful classical computer and I want to simulate a gigantic system of particles including aggregates of particles (e.g. people) performing measurements of other…

[deleted]

Re: What does randomness look like?

#114

Post by [deleted] »

Xcelerate wrote: post #109
andrewcooke wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you expect to implement the "as-yet-undiscovered pseudorandom number generator" without any state ("hidden variables")?

I'm just an engineer, so I'm not actually trying to challenge accepted thinking. However, it is well known that any QM system can be simulated using a classical computer, with the penalty of exponential slowdown. Let's say that I have a hypothetical, ultra-powerful classical computer and I want to simulate a gigantic system of particles including aggregates of particles (e.g. people) performing measurements of other…

[deleted]

Re: What does randomness look like?

#115

Post by emp_ »

henrikschroder wrote: post #11

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…

During the first long raid (Molten Core) the loot table had a weird deviance of being very similar depending on the player that created the raid, Blizzard said that was impossible but in reality guilds would just rotate the raid leader until they hit someone that "would", for example, drop the legendary bindings and stick with that RL for a while -- it worked for many people and 4 or 5 years later one dev finally answered the big question: "Is loot defined when you kill the mob" or "is loot defined when the raid is instanced" which is the second option, the sum of these plus some weird bug that they might have fixed silently at some point might have caused the RL rotation hoax.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#116

Post by lutusp »

endtime wrote: post #80
lutusp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Uniformly distributed? Yes. Random? No. I think you're fudging what is supposed to be uniform here. In your example, the unigrams (i.e. single digits) may be uniform, but the n-grams for n > 2 are not.

Actually, the n-grams are periodic and repetitive also. They certainly aren't random.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#117

Post by bcbrown »

martinced wrote: post #43
thurn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That's interesting but then we're talking about another game. If there's a pack of cards indicating dice results you can have the equivalent of a 'warm deck' and a 'cold deck'. Players can then start counting. E.g.: I know '8' came out 7 times and '6' only came out once, then it changes my strategy because there's a benefit to expand with a new settlement (or make a "city") on an '6' instead of an '8'. I'm not agains…

They mitigate that by discarding without looking several of the cards, so it's not a completely even distribution of outcomes. E.g., it's possible that 4 of the '6's won't come out at all that time through the deck.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#118

Post by endtime »

lutusp wrote: post #116
endtime wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uniformly distributed? Yes. Random? No. I think you're fudging what is supposed to be uniform here. In your example, the unigrams (i.e. single digits) may be uniform, but the n-grams for n > 2 are not.

Actually, the n-grams are periodic and repetitive also. They certainly aren't random.

They may be periodic and repetitive, but they aren't uniform. For example, there are lots of "01"s and no "02"s.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#119

Post by jebblue »

I was happy that the first example with the dots looked like the second one was natural. My eyes felt better. With the student example my eyes struggled so I "reasoned" that the first one had more clumps and was wrong since the first dot example had more clumps and was wrong.

I guess I'm not a good randomness detective.

Re: What does randomness look like?

#120

Post by ashutosh2000 »

This article is really interesting. It says that randomness doesn't mean uniformity but true randomness can have clusters. So what exactly is randomness? How can we define randomness? Is Math.random() is really random? Which is the best random function and how can we find if it is purely random?
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