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Can Games be Truly Random?

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Can Games be Truly Random? Empty Can Games be Truly Random?

Post  KatieBradford Sun May 03, 2009 1:18 pm

http://forge.ironrealms.com/2006/06/09/rock-paper-scissors/

This article touches on the effect of random strategies in games such as rock, paper, scissors, and various computer games. It claims that while complete randomness might be the "perfect defense" because no one can predict your moves and thus play against them, it also prevents you from taking advantage of your opponents habits or weaknesses. Furthermore, it references the true difficultly of being completely random, as it is near impossible. Instead other factors influence the way in which various games are played. While numerically or chance wise there's a 50% chance of going one way or another, by studing your opponent you may learn of (perhaps less logical) patterns they develop.

KatieBradford

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Join date : 2009-04-13

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Post  Kevin Kao Sun May 03, 2009 1:56 pm

if the best strategy is complete randomness, does that mean the rock paper scissors machine we made in mechatronics is the best possible RPS player? since machines don't have a mind to read, per se

http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/wiki/index.php/Rock_Paper_Scissors_Machine

Kevin Kao

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Post  Andrew Kessler Sun May 03, 2009 2:41 pm

Are a computer's choices actually random though? I remember reading something in Computer Science about how when computer's pick a random numbers, it's actually only pseudo-random, because they pick a number from a list in a "random" order (at least that's how Java does it). I'm willing to bet that this pseudo-randomness is fine for the purposes of rock paper scissors (as well as many other applications), but it brings up an interesting point about how much shuffling to do you have to do before you can actually call something random?

Here's a link about pseudo-randomness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

Andrew Kessler

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