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Re:Why is quality of pseudorandom number generators important? by fvirexi on Thursday February 06, 2014 @06:03AM (#7189742)
Can't this be partially solved by just throwing multiple dices? E.g two 6-sided dices would then have a higher chance of 7 than 12.
Re:Why is quality of pseudorandom number generators important? by netcan on Thursday February 06, 2014 @06:16AM (#7189776)
IMO the problem can be best explained with a classroom experiment, almost like a magic trick. It is a built in human intuition which is at odds with the reality of randomness.

Split your class into 2. Give half A the players dice and a piece of paper. Give other half B just a piece of paper. Half B plays with imaginary dice, Half A with real dice. Everyone records 20 games of a piece of paper. You hand in the papers and the demonstrator (or maybe a new one that hasn't been in the class, for extra theatrics) looks at the papers. He will accurately place them into separate piles.

The trick is that fake randomness and real randomness are different enough that they are distinguishable with a high level of accuracy. Real dice will roll the same number in a row far more often than fake dice. The more games you play, the more accurately they can be distinguished.

You can look at the formulas to figure out the odds of rolling the same number 4 times in 100 rolls, but it doesn't drive home the message that your intuition is broken until you see intuition being beaten consistently and reliably by a better tool. It's fun too.

Re:Why is quality of pseudorandom number generators important? by nmc on Thursday February 06, 2014 @06:51AM (#7189874)
Last year I wrote a short Python script to easily visualize that kind of effect: https://github.com/ncanceill/alea_jacta_lib