XKCD should solve the problem the same way Tetris randomizers do. In Tetris, they don't use naive memoryless uniform randomizers for pretty much the same reasons that people are complaining about in this article: you tend to get these long droughts and floods of pieces that you want or don't want. Instead, they just do a random permutation of all 7 pieces, spawn those, then do another random permutation, etc. XKCD could easily do this kind of thing (with cookies, I guess).
How random is xkcd? (2015)
131–133 of 133 posts
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is there any algorithm that would do that without actually storing a list of indices, or track IDs?
I can't think of why someone would prefer a truly random song being played from a playlist rather than the "deck of cards" method.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 sens…
> His original goal was to make his simple combat stat system clear to users by describing its odds as odds conventionally are described. Except that odds values don't add on to each other. It sounds like the numbers only worked like odds in a single way, and not in other ways. The system was inherently contradictory, and confusion is not irrational in that situation. And it's easy to clarify something as odds by mak…
1:3 (one to three) odds aren't the same as 1/3 odds (1 in 3 odds).
1:3 means the second outcome (that on the right-hand side of the ':' symbol) is 3 times as likely as the former outcome, which is true when the likelihood of the first outcome is 25% and the likelihood of the second outcome is 75%.
1/3 describes the chances only of one of the outcomes, and fixes it at 33⅓%. If there's only one other outcome, its likelihood is 66⅔%.
Is the 'addition' you're talking about just one of the readings of the first syntax, or did I miss something else in the video that made the initial presentation of those odds figures surprising?
Sorry if my terminology is off; it's been a long time since I did any stats