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.
What does randomness look like?
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: What does randomness look like?
#42Earlier 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!
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…
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Re: What does randomness look like?
#43Back 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!
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 against it: it's interesting. But it's not really the Settlers of Catan anymore: it's a game which happens to share a lot of rules with the Settlers of Catan but which is definitely different.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#44Back 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!
I was under the impression that a uniform distribution is still considered random, but that there are simply many other random distributions. If you have a flat 1/10 chance of receiving a certain item, then sure, you might do the task 30 times without getting it. But if it were programmed such that you will always receive the item at some point within the first 10 completions of the task (i.e. 10% of players receive it after their first completion, 10% after their second completion, etc.) I would still consider that random, and not really more or less random than the 1/10 scenario. I'm not sure what you mean by "real randomness."
Re: What does randomness look like?
#45Earlier 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!
Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random. This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw. I disagree with the uniform "should be", because there are so many different design objectives. Slot machines aren't "good games" by Euro standards, but people spend a lot of money on them. (One can argue about whether that's enjoyment or addiction. I'll ski…
> This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.
Incidentally, apparently people complain about the online versions of the game providing a land distribution that's "too even".
Also, while mana screw sucks, between the fact that you can decide whether or not to begin with a certain opening hand and the fact that you can design your deck around such circumstances (mana fixing, proper distribution of card costs), it's far more fun than the alternative.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#46Regarding the bomb plot at the very bottom. Examining the number of bombs dropped in each square and comparing it to the Poisson distribution, it appears that the distribution of the bombs is random. But looking at the plot on the map, it appears that the higher incidence of bombs is focused on a specific region. The Poisson distribution doesn't account for the fact that a lot of the squares with a high incidence of…
If you read the linked post its clearer whats going on: http://madvis.blogspot.ie/2010/09/flying-bombs-on-london-sum... The poisson analysis is only done on a subset of the area thats in the 3d plots: "Clarke's analysis was focused on the central area of higher density here and with finer geographic coordinates. Within that area his analysis found no evidence of clustering that cannot be accounted for by a Poisson pr…
Yes, it could have been a bit more clear in how they "weren't being aimed". Obviously the Germans did not just point them straight up and light them off, hoping for the best. What this really demonstrated was something more like where the noise floor for the bomb distribution was. They could hit "London" but they couldn't hit any particular place in it. Very important for the military to know that information.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#47Earlier 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!
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 miss, which comes to about 12.7 per million.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#48Earlier 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!
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…
> 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?
Re: What does randomness look like?
#49I'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" that this article and many comments seem to be eluding [sic] to?
First, s/eluding/alluding/
Second, although the topic is complex, one test of randomness is that an ideal compression method, one able to find and exploit any repetitive pattern, cannot compress a random sequence.
Third, the term "entropy" as used in information theory is tied to randomness, as explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
A quote: "The entropy rate for a [fair coin] toss is one bit per toss. However, if the coin is not fair, then the uncertainty, and hence the entropy rate, is lower."
Based on that, high entropy -> high randomness.
Not to oversimplify a complex topic.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#50I'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.
The distributions are describing different aspects. Let's take the WoW loot example. A monster could drop 50 different objects with equal probability. Kill it a few million times you'll get a uniform distribution of kills against item type.
Now if we take that same kill data and instead ask how many times do I get item type 2 in 100 kills you'll see a Poisson distribution. If you didn't see a Poisson distribution when asking that question then the events were probably not independent of each other, and hence weren't actually random (e.g. The monster could just drop the 50 items types in order).