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The_Tauren13 said:
You are determined to think me the fool, simply by my choice of wording, when your English is not so perfect either. Lets just say, for it to not be 'poor', in my eyes, I should be able to observe the results of the RNG and accumilate reasonable statistical results.
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I don't claim the perfect knowledge of English, it's not even my native language, but I don't see any other possible meaning of your
over half of all PC games have poor random number generators, but to think that you have either found somewhere a research that studied in details RNG in more than a half of PC games or you've conducted such a study yourself. Considering amount of time and effort required to perform such a task I find it hard to believe that your statement was based on facts and not on a wrong expectations from RNG. Another doubt comes, because RNG for uniformly distributed numbers is included in CRT and most games are likely to use it. Those RNG are not perfect, but you won't find their faults without collecting massive amounts of data.
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The_Tauren13 said:
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alexti said:
It is very probable that few of them will get quite a few tails in a row. So one of them has posted his question
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Perhaps your Dom II experience differs greatly from mine, but I have noticed many examples of random magic paths following odd distributions. Allow me to look at my current games: King of the Hill: 32 sages, no astral. So... (5/6)^32 ≈ .00293, .00293 * 6 magic paths ≈ .0176 = 1.76%... quite a low probablitity. Now we are looking at nearly 6 tails in a row, which is of course still believable...
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Now, am I missing something? Sages have complete random, right? So the probability of never getting one particular path in sequence of 32 sages is (7/8)^32=0.014 and the probability of never getting unspecified path in sequence of 32 sages is 0.11 - 11%. (That is 10.8% rounded to 11, not 0.014*8, because possibility of 2 missing paths needs to be taken into account). I assume that you would have made a similar observation if your 32 sages were missing some other path. So the probability of making your observation is any particular game is 11% (it's close to the probability of getting 3 tails in a row).
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The_Tauren13 said:
Unfortunately I am now forced to finish this message on another computer, so when I get home I can look at Borrowed Time as well and see the distribution of my Sauromancers' paths. If that isn't enough data for you, I could run a test game and recruit a hundred random mages... Hell, you could run a test game if youre not too busy. If I come up with more reasonable results,
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That again goes back to my question of your usage of "poor". What do you expect as "reasonable results"? Any particular result that you'll get has quite low probability of happening. However, when you play the game, some result *has* to happened. There isn't any "highly probable" result. RNG would start looking suspicious if you were repeatedly getting the same lowly probable results. (For example, missing astral in 32 sages in every game you've played).
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The_Tauren13 said:
I may concede the point that Dominions II is not another example of a poor RNG. But it would take much more for me to concede my other examples... but those games aren't half as good as Dom II, so who cares  . If you give me your email I could send you my turn files and you can check my mage counting...
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I don't doubt your counting and I don't suspect your data, I just questioning the conclusion you make from those observations...
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The_Tauren13 said:
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alexti said:
Of course, that doesn't prove that there's no problems with RNG, but this test, it passes very well.
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Perhaps, which is why I am attempting to further testing. But I dont have Dominions II installed here so you will have to wait.
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This is well intended effort, but you need to understand what you're looking for. Let's say you look into some saved game and do the count. You can find some "unique feature" there (like 32 sages without astral). By itself, that doesn't indicate anything (because some result had to happen). However, if you can find the same "unique feature" in many other games, that will start to look suspicious. So I suggest you to list "unique features" you want to consider, then I will look for the same features in my games (I have few dozen of saved games I can check).
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The_Tauren13 said:
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alexti said:
Btw, I've noticed that you were not losing time meanwhile and have expanded your knowledge from over a half of PC games to the whole universe 
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Indeed. If you dispute my deterministic view of the universe and my claim that everything in the universe comes down to gravitational, nuclear, electromagnetic, etc. (which are not random) forces acting on atomic particles, go ahead, and we can argue that as well .
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No... I'm disputing your ability to know every aspect of the universe
To my knowledge deterministic/stochastic nature [of nearly anything] have not been established by the science and I haven't heard about anybody getting anywhere closer to understanding of those things. It is not even clear what kind of methods one can use to reliable establish deterministic/stochastic nature of something.