Quote:
Originally Posted by fadetree
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Loramin, you always immediately want to argue with me, not sure why, but you are actually agreeing with some of my points as far as I can tell.
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Honest to god I didn't even notice/care whose name as on the left, and I have nothing whatsoever for or against you; you're just another poster to me and I was responding to what you wrote, not to you.
TLDR; Don't flatter yourself
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fadetree
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The software absolutely does use pseudo random numbers. These numbers are generated by a deterministic algorithm. They do not have an infinite range. They are indeed tested and designed to have a 'normal' distribution, meaning no huge lopsided runs as far as possible. As far as seeds, most are timer based but not all. Linux has it's own entropy source that is built up out of a bunch of different things, because just relying on an always increasing timer is actually *not* a very good source of randomness.
If you take all possible seeds, say a 32 or 64 bit integer range, and you feed them all one by one to a RNG, and you iterate each one fully across its range, you will get every possible number they can generate. That collection is not infinite. If you then do the exact same thing again, you'll get the same collection in the same order. Your point above about a 'truly random RNG' is the heart of the problem...P99 does not have, and there does not exist, a truly random algorithmic RNG. It is not possible. That's really my point - no computer generated series of RNG numbers is actually random. Can there be long sequences of 0's ? Sure, but if there are too many then that's not a very good RNG, the whole point is to have a normal distribution. I would expect there is no seed you can feed to an RNG that would wind up generating nothing but 0's across the whole range.
So whatever, put too much effort into this already. Rebut away.
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So, my post was not a treatise on how RNGs in computers work, it was just an explanation of some basics. But you seem to be stuck in the weeds of the argument, and it's making your miss the forest from the trees (to mix metaphors).
Yes, computer RNGs are only pseudo-random. No that does not mean you can't get a "series of 0's". Despite there being limits to how actually random a computer-generated random number can be, those limits
in no way prevent a series of zeroes. They are not random in a mathematical sense, and there's ways you can prove as much, but for practical purposes in a computer game they are more than random enough.
And yes, the people that make the algorithms to generate RNGs
do expect their RNGs to generate a certain distribution of numbers ... but that distribution includes extreme cases on both ends (long series of zeroes and long series of ones). If you don't see those happening (very rarely) you've made a terrible RNG.
So look, we don't need to get all computer science theory about this: the intricate details of how RNGs work simply aren't relevant. All anyone needs to know is that computer RNGs generate non-random, but close enough to random to be good enough for our purposes, random numbers. And those random numbers can and will (in an infinite timeline) result in a long series of misses for Trakanon at some point
unless the EQ Emulator software says itself says otherwise.