Random Magic Paths - is it truly random?

[Saber Cherry]

Furthermore, unless I'm just up too late and should really go to bed now (probably true), it seems that the chances of 20 random picks missing a least one path (in other words, getting 20 consecutive sages and still not having 8 paths between them) is 43.6%, which is relatively high. Math:

1-((1-.0692)^8), where the .0692 is derived from the same calculation as above.

As far as RNGs go, I found a really nice one, called the Mersenne Twister. It is a software RNG, but the software actually finds stray radioactive particles in the dust on your CPU and monitors them for randomness. If you clean your case a lot the randomness goes down, which may explain some of the problems in this thread.

On the other hand... I just disassembled dom2.exe and got this little code fragment... maybe this is the problem?

Code:

---

public int rand(){

	for(int i=0; i<100; i++){

		if(seemsRandom(i)){return i;}

	}

	return secret_very_random_number;

}



public boolean seemsRandom(int x){

	// note:  add some stuff here before Dominions 3 is released

	return true;

}



private int secret_very_random_number=42;

---