Math and Spawn Rates

[eqravenprince]

It is far more likely you were killing the wrong ph or doing something wrong or the spawn rate % is wrong. The chances of killing a ph with a 5% chance of spawning 270 times without getting it to spawn at least once is so small that I would consider it statistically impossible.

[khanable]

Well good. Now I know which of you are mathematically inclined so you can peer-review my analysis of the current AC system in a few weeks.

Also, I just wanted to point out I have claimed the title of Zanderr's worst customer.

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[zanderklocke]

Originally Posted by khanable [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Also, I just wanted to point out I have claimed the title of Zanderr's worst customer.

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Nah. We just had bad luck. You were nailing placeholders above and beyond needed, and we had good conversation. Sometimes, good conversation is better than a night of "good drops".

[Snagglepuss]

Thanks guys! This is great.

Loraen, that math is nice. I know enough about stats from my college course to communicate, but thank you for helping me with this. Exactly what I wanted to see.

Eqravenprince, the spawn might be indeed 1% on the Rotting Skeleton, but like I mentioned, I took it from the wiki's "stated amount" for what its worth. Thank you for the table, that is exactly the type of data I wanted to see. It's a nice gauge of where you fall in the luck-o-meter.

For all the "p99 iz fullz of Tr0LLz" and people who ask if the community is nice or not, this thread shows that we have some really helpful people here.

Thanks everyone for who contributed!

[Sirken]

its random. and 5% = 5/100 or 1/20

that being said, it's random. if u have a 5% chance, you essentially are rolling a 100 sided die and hoping for a 1,2,3,4,5. but its a new roll each time. so its no really like you are improving your odds with each ph kill, as they do not get you closer to popping a mob like Quillmane for example,

for example, i've seen the AC in oot pop 4 times in 6 spawns, and i've watched people kill the PH and never see the AC.

embrace your random number generator

[falkun]

I, for one, welcome our new

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

random number generator

overlord.

[Nlaar]

I remember speaking with a friend circa summer 2010 about the RNG and how it was his and his guild's belief that sometimes the RNG "got stuck."

In other words, when clearing a plane (Hate for example) one would note that the same rare item would drop with increased frequency, all within a single raid e.g., cleric legs dropping 3 times in one raid or the shaman bp dropped twice in one raid. I don't raid as much as these days, but I remember examples of this sort of thing happening very frequently during planar clears.

So when one hears about AC popping 4/6 times for some people and "never" for others it's hard not to think that the RNG is "bursting" at some points and "off" at others leading one to question the reliability of the RNG.

However, do I have any actual evidence? Of course not, that would be to convenient!

[Sirken]

Originally Posted by Nlaar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I remember speaking with a friend circa summer 2010 about the RNG and how it was his and his guild's belief that sometimes the RNG "got stuck."

In other words, when clearing a plane (Hate for example) one would note that the same rare item would drop with increased frequency, all within a single raid e.g., cleric legs dropping 3 times in one raid or the shaman bp dropped twice in one raid. I don't raid as much as these days, but I remember examples of this sort of thing happening very frequently during planar clears.

So when one hears about AC popping 4/6 times for some people and "never" for others it's hard not to think that the RNG is "bursting" at some points and "off" at others leading one to question the reliability of the RNG.

However, do I have any actual evidence? Of course not, that would be to convenient!

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[August]

Originally Posted by Sirken [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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No need to be patronizing. A random number generator, based on implementation, can very well get 'stuck', or atleast provide very non-random outcomes with regularity

I'll give an example. I work at a pretty nice software firm that suffered a problem whenever running... things through other things.

See, the test in question always got hung and no one could figure out why. It was a series of logic steps that required a Random() call 10 times. It just so happened that if a certain number hit during this random jump, then the test would enter into an infinite loop. Shoddy programming, and the fix was easy. The strange part, however, was the frequency in which it happened.

See, the calculated frequency of this happening was below 1% if you went by pure odds. However, we noted that on 33% of our runs this would happen.

But, August! you say, what if you used the same SEED -- of course it would happen over and over! And so I investigated and found that seed was taken off of milliseconds of the current time -- 'random' to the 1000 chance, I suppose.

So, I made a little program that does the same thing as the test without the encumbrance, of, say, the test. And then I printed the results out with the different seeds, the random numbers generated, etc.

I found a couple of things upon parsing:

1) The same seed repeatedly got used when I ran the test -or rather, the same 'set' of seeds got cycled over and over. We were just taking milliseconds, but the same 3 digit seeds kept popping up. This could be a problem in numerous places, but maybe the system clock!

2) When we modulo'd by our bound there was the dreaded value in about 1/3 of these sets of numbers. Hence our near 33% hang rate. I then went and force-seeded all 1000 millieseconds and found that in around 23% of them, the first 10 rands on our modulo would produce a hang-result by random 10.


So, what can we learn?

1) Nothing is random
2) Implementation is everything

The OP may be unlucky, or there may be something wrong w/ the code behind it, or the OP may be doin something wrong -- I don't know.

But let's not call people tinfoil hatters when there could be a logical explanation. Programmers aren't perfect, and nobody that I'm aware of has ever created a truly 'random' implementation in software.

[Briscoe]

I think we've all had times where we felt like the RNG is just running off of the RANDU algorithm, amirite guys? (Expecting at least Loraen to laugh at this).