Random Numbers Generator

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As for your game, if the quarter is fair (in terms of weight, and actually having two distinct sides) the chance it is heads is equal to the chance it is tails = 50%.

The quarter is sitting on my desk. I am looking at it directly. How sure are you that there is a 50% chance that it's tails? Would you bet your life savings on that? I am curious.

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Courageous wrote:

"

As for your game, if the quarter is fair (in terms of weight, and actually having two distinct sides) the chance it is heads is equal to the chance it is tails = 50%.

The quarter is sitting on my desk. I am looking at it directly. How sure are you that there is a 50% chance that it's tails? Would you bet your life savings on that? I am curious.

again, if it is a fair coin that has one side heads and one side tails, and no weight variations making it "prefer" a certain side - yes it is 50%.
the problem is there's a huge difference between the theoretical fair coin used in probability, and the real one on your desk which may not be fair.

also, I wouldn't bet my life savings on anything. I make money by taking only calculated risks, and believe people who like to go "all in" would eventually lose everything.
that's why I'm not too good at Poker :)

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Again, if it is a fair coin that has one side heads and one side tails, and no weight variations making it "prefer" a certain side - yes it is 50%.

I am looking at that quarter, John. The chances of it being tails are 0%.

The quarter was perfectly fair, but as I stated before, it was already flipped. It was heads.

I'll personally send you $1 by paypal if you can in your next post even vaguely guess the message I am attempting to impart here. How's that for a gamble? ;-P

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Courageous wrote:

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Again, if it is a fair coin that has one side heads and one side tails, and no weight variations making it "prefer" a certain side - yes it is 50%.

I am looking at that quarter, John. The chances of it being tails are 0%.

The quarter was perfectly fair, but as I stated before, it was already flipped. It was heads.

I'll personally send you $1 by paypal if you can in your next post even vaguely guess the message I am attempting to impart here. How's that for a gamble? ;-P

no offense, but don't be a smart-ass.
my answer was for the result of your coin toss, not what you did afterwards when that result was already determined.
also, the chance your coin is fair is 0% because no real coin is fair, like jwiz rightfully noted. if it was, you could throw it a million times and it would land heads half the time and tails half the time. same with 100 million times, and a billion times...

send your dollar to jwiz. he got it right.
I make 20x that in half an hour of work.

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Courageous wrote:

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Again, if it is a fair coin that has one side heads and one side tails, and no weight variations making it "prefer" a certain side - yes it is 50%.

I am looking at that quarter, John. The chances of it being tails are 0%.

The quarter was perfectly fair, but as I stated before, it was already flipped. It was heads.

I'll personally send you $1 by paypal if you can in your next post even vaguely guess the message I am attempting to impart here. How's that for a gamble? ;-P

Ha, my stats and probability used that exact example, and he was like its 100% and everyone was confused

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my answer was for the result of your coin toss, not what you did afterwards when that result was already determined.

I was not being a smart ass. I was super specific, quite intentionally, on describing the event, after the fact. I even stated that I was looking at the quarter, after it was flipped. The keywords I was looking for was "randomness" versus "uncertainty." Depending what field you come from, you can regard these distinctions as relevant, or irrelevant, depending. But they are important. Because, I, holding privileged information, have considerably different uncertainty than do you. This applies in a huge variety of real world circumstances.

A practical example would be casinos in the united states, which are regulated by law. If you see in the control center for major casino, you can see who's going to get an (electronic) payout before they do, and from your perspective, the gambler is engaging in something that is not particularly random at all.

I think a quantum physicist (I always want to call them "quantum mechanics," ha ha) would argue that there is not practicable difference between randonmness and uncertainty as far as they are concerned. Someone else might say otherwise. Particularly if where you are playing involves people who hold privileged information.

Do you see what I am getting at?

Computer RNG's and cryptography both have something in common. They are not random, but are, when well-implemented, seemingly random, to a party without privileged information. So. Are these two distinctions any different, as a matter of reduction to practice? I think not, in this case.

Just a bit of idle philosophy for you.

Rather pointless, but it will make you (perhaps not very) entertaining at parties.

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Jwiz wrote:

No, he is probably <g> right,
A long while ago I read (actually stumbled through) an article about randomness without chance.
It described among others why the commmonplace coin tossing experiment, though producing a random sequence as an outcome, is only to be regarded as a deterministic process without chance.
The articel gave me the headaches and I forgot most of it already.
Have to look it up again.

I have to admit I don't know probability too well. I only deal with the math required for me to do my job as a coder and system-designer, and read theory out of pure hunger for knowledge.

arguing with Courageous about probability is likely stepping into home-court for him, and half-uncharted territory for me.
the amount of such "trick questions" is almost endless. my Professor had tons of these years ago.

but I feel we deviated from the subject at hand here, here's a summary of the points I'm trying to explain in this thread:

1) the drop and enchant system in Path Of Exile isn't purely random. it can't be.

2) the developers are likely using a ready-made pseudo-RNG, since making one from scratch is needless, messy, time-consuming work.

3) that RNG accepts parameters from the other game code, and it's those parameters that need to be re-balanced, to avoid making the whole game into one giant lottery, where progress is based on luck and not player skill or amount of effort. especially with orbs that create and link sockets in items, but also considering the fact orbs are the only way to trade and vendor in this game - so it makes no sense to tie them to the RNG with the same parameters as other loot.