yfimc wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 16:42
Stroom wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 07:33
You clearly don't know how randomness works
There are probably hundreds of Catan games being played on BGA. And a few of them have skewed distributions. Those are what are posted about. People get angry but they don't mention the majority of somewhat OK distributions.
You're being rude and condescending. If I say I know how random numbers work, believe me. I find the games I play on BGA do not match the distribution of rolls of the games I play in real life.
You are not the first person and you won't be the last. And every time I see people like you claim that they understand randomness. And it appears that they have no clue how many biases they have about how randomness "must" work.
This is a common bias that you are expressing. I am pretty sure that you do not track dice rolls in real life games. I have had plenty of games where the same number is rolled 4 times in a row. I have had plenty of games where one number is not rolled for the whole game.
yfimc wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 16:42
Stroom wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 07:33
If you do a coin flip 4 times and you get 3 heads, 1 tails or even 4 heads, it would seem very irregular. But in the grand scheme, it is expected to happen quite often. Similarly, a game of Catan lasts for about 70 rolls. Which is about 2 sets of combinations for 2 die rolls. Very few turns so you won't get a perfect bell curve in every game.
70 trials is not very few. 4 is few. 70 is a lot and you should expect the numbers to approximate a bell curve.
And like I said that is not the first game where I got a strange distribution, that's just the one where I finally came to the forums.
70 rolls IS very few for Catan. I specifically used 4 coin flips vs 70 die rolls. Because if you roll 2 dice then you get one full set of all possibilities in 36 die rolls. x2 = 72 so it is comparable to 4 coin flips as one coin flip has 2 possibilities. If you roll dice 36 times, would you get every possible combination? No. 2 or 12 can clearly be missing at such a small set of results. And even with x2 as many rolls, some of those can be missing.
For 2 die rolls, to CONSISTENTLY get a normal distribution, you'd have to roll maybe 360 times. And even then you can get outliers.
Again, this is another explanation of you not knowing how randomness works and that you have the human bias of expecting the randomness to beave in a pattern that you expect... for clearly too small number of observations.
You seem to expect that previous dice rolls somehow influence future rolls too. They don't. Bell curve does not have time to balance itself if you have already had an instance of one number being rolled more than usual. The game usually ends around 70 turns in so you don't have it balancing out.
yfimc wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 16:42
Stroom wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 07:33
Humans believe that the dice roll patterns have to be as close to the average in every game. And that's wrong. People who can't get over it, should play some other games.
These are some wild generalizations.
Not wild at all. This is how people who don't understand randomness, often think.
yfimc wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 16:42
Stroom wrote: ↑04 December 2023, 07:33
For sure, over thousands of games, the averages of dice roll results will resemble a bell curve. Enough has been done already to display the fairness of RNG. But every few weeks another person comes and asks us to re-do these tests. It's like hitting refresh and expecting a different result.
I'm not saying it's not fair, I'm saying it's not seeming to behave as though it's random based on my experience in 150 games. And what I'm hearing from folks responding is you have faith in the RNG technology on BGA, and no faith in people's experiences so you blindly trust that the RNG will produce a normal distribution over time, but nobody has actually verified that.
I have learned enough about different RNGs, including the one BGA uses, from the previous 10 times I have had this conversation on different platforms. RNG systems are random enough for a dice roll that is rounded down to 1-6 while it could be used for a random number in the billions. You should be much more worried about your physical dice and the way you roll them.
RNG normal distribution capabilities have been tested hundreds of times. You coming here asking us to run the test one more time does not change anything. You can go and test it yourself too if you want to. There are plenty of pages online that use the same basic RNG that most online pages use. It can have theoretical issues only in the general pattern in such a miniscule way that you can't see it for a rounded down version.
All your concerns are human bias talking and it shows. And sorry for being condescending, it is just getting old and no-one has come up with anything new.
