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(Random Number Generator)
So, I went to the Lake Rathe Arena, and watching TV with my eyeballs I tapped a hotkey to do /ran 32000 five times about 2 thousand times. (with logging on) Noone else in the zone, no mobs in the zone, and I read a dev saying that the RNG is per zone.
Now, why did I bother?
On the Commodore 64, and Microsoft Quickbasic (iirc) if you used the default RNG to generate points to plot of a graph (like the monitor) each number would appear random, but you would get a result like:
Because each number used the prior number as a seed. Individually the numbers appeared random, but taken in pairs, a blatant pattern appears.
Since a Tradeskill combine is a Pair of randoms (one for success, one for skill) I thought that perhaps the streakyness folks were seeing was due to pairs of numbers forming a pattern.
What incited me to test it was the Casino spammers in Bazaar telling their clients to only roll when told, they would then /ran a bunch of times, then tell the client to roll. I thought that perhaps they had sussed a pattern in the RNG.
Parse and display; unfortunetly, I don't have hosting at the moment, so if would be difficult to share the raw data; the word to best describe the result is 'Snow' no detectible pattern, I thought I had one for a bit, but it was a small scaling error in the display function that I ironed out.
I tried shuffling the numbers many different ways, but nothing that even hinted at a pattern, much less predictability. I think the EQ RNG is at good as it gets.
Which made it odd when I was doing some smithing the other night, and got (201), (202), (203), and (204) on consecutive combines
So, I went to the Lake Rathe Arena, and watching TV with my eyeballs I tapped a hotkey to do /ran 32000 five times about 2 thousand times. (with logging on) Noone else in the zone, no mobs in the zone, and I read a dev saying that the RNG is per zone.
Now, why did I bother?
On the Commodore 64, and Microsoft Quickbasic (iirc) if you used the default RNG to generate points to plot of a graph (like the monitor) each number would appear random, but you would get a result like:
Code:
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
Since a Tradeskill combine is a Pair of randoms (one for success, one for skill) I thought that perhaps the streakyness folks were seeing was due to pairs of numbers forming a pattern.
What incited me to test it was the Casino spammers in Bazaar telling their clients to only roll when told, they would then /ran a bunch of times, then tell the client to roll. I thought that perhaps they had sussed a pattern in the RNG.
Parse and display; unfortunetly, I don't have hosting at the moment, so if would be difficult to share the raw data; the word to best describe the result is 'Snow' no detectible pattern, I thought I had one for a bit, but it was a small scaling error in the display function that I ironed out.
I tried shuffling the numbers many different ways, but nothing that even hinted at a pattern, much less predictability. I think the EQ RNG is at good as it gets.
Which made it odd when I was doing some smithing the other night, and got (201), (202), (203), and (204) on consecutive combines