Impailer wrote:
This generality is false. Older computer languages had very rudimentary random number generators that lacked the sophistication to avoid coming up with the same calculation over and over and over. Some of these still exist today! (Case in point, the 'random play feature' in the iPod is not very good.) They did not distribute the numbers evenly over a given number of calculations, as I have recently found out, as applied to a single die. I don't know much about the modern versions of random number generators, nor the one used for Blue Max. It may or may not be based on older algorithms. It's amazing how much of the old stuff is 'good enough' and carried forward because it's hardly used. This may be the case. I suspect it is, and still believe there is not an equal distribution of numbers over a large number of rolls using this function in the game.
I would still like to see empirical evidence to the contrary.
Impailer
The problem with bad random number generator is not lack of equiprobability distribution (i.e. all number comes out with the same probability) which is very easy to obtain, but the correlation of their "rolls" or the short period of their pseudorandom sequences.
This can create problems in many fields of use but not for simple applications such as gameplay.
If you want to know a bit more you can start from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number_generator |