Forum

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Too many, my friend, too many 😀

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Dune2000 wrote:

OK so I don’t have the brains of you guys on this issue clearly, but I have a problem with some of the language

The gist seems to be that the slots are random number generators which can produce any results.  But then we go on to say that a house edge is built in, which surely means that they cannot be random, else how can you build in an edge.   And here comes my next question, if you can build in an edge what is to stop you reprogramming that random slot to give yourself a greater edge.

I have observed slots where the average payout reduces based on your stake – again this seems to imply that  this randomness is controlled else how could you facilitate a different level of RTP for each stake.

So all of this to me creates doubt on the industries use of the phrase random number generator, its seems to be more a controlled random number generator which is a contradiction in terms.

 

How slots can be both random and have an RTP is exactly what I explained in this thread, but here’s a way of understanding that’s a little less mathematical:

Imagine a dice roll game, two normal six sided dice. It costs £1 a play. If the total on your dice after rolling them is 8 or higher you win £2. If not you lose.

Random and RTP is that simple – the outcome of the dice rolls is genuinely random, but you only have a 41% (5 out of 12) chance of winning. When you do win, you win double the stake. This means in 1000 plays of that game, if I was the casino, I would take in £1000 in revenue, but expect to pay out around £820 in winnings. Thus the game has an RTP of 82%.

Slots are a little more complicated but the basic principle is the same – the outcome is the dice roll, it’s random and can’t be manipulated. The design of the game (typically via the layout of the reels and the paytable) creates a theoretical RTP which the game will meet over millions of spins.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Also if anyone is a bit of a maths geek, these are interesting reads:

Mersenne Twister is the PRNG algorithm most commonly used in computing for non-sensitive situations, as its results mirror true random very closely and make it appropriate for scientific uses such as simulating physical processes. It is not a CSPRNG as its outcomes can be intelligently distinguished from true random if both the use of the MT algorithm and internal system state are known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister

CSPRNGs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator

 

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

ImperialDragon wrote:

I thought I’d bump this thread for Argyl as I found this an interesting read.

I don’t know PHP, but your program reads similar to how it would have been in if it was written in JavaScript, Python and Pascal (a combination of those).  Your REM statements explained the program very well and teaches a good starting point in slots maths.

There was a debate on page 1 here about what random is.  I know that some programming languages will use a lookup table which is just a large set of numbers where were pre-determined back at the factory.  An example of this is on the BBC Micro computer, where using the RND command will output the first result seen in the table.  If you switch the BBC off and back on again, RND will pull the first result again.

In QBASIC (PCs running Windows or DOS), you can type in RANDOMISE TIMER, then any RND commands after that will use the CPU’s clock.  Each second is divided into milliseconds (and even smaller segments) and the RND command will pull whichever thousandth or millionth of a second it was on in order to generate a result.

For slots, they can be online or offline (arcade / shops).  I’m not sure about offline, but online slots will be (or should be) sync’d with the World Clock, as per Android and Apple devices that are always online.

REM, QBASIC….good lord, that takes me back!! On the point you raise, there are a couple of points I think are worth clearing up, which I have mentioned elsewhere but will go over again:

Computers physically are deterministic state machines, really they’re very, very fancy calculators. They are not capable of being what you might call “true random”, since they can only operate on algorithms. The algorithms computers use to create sequences of numbers which appear random are called “pseudo-random number generators”.

These are just fixed mathematical formulas which take some input number (we call this the RNGs “seed”), then do some arithmetic stuff with it to transform in to a different number. This number is then used as the seed to the next request for another random number. What we commonly do in non-sensitive computer contexts – i.e. where we want a number which is more-or-less random but unbiased, “true random” results are not really important – is make this “seed” the current time measured as the number of seconds which have elapsed since midnight on January 1st 1970. At the time of me writing this, the current time using that measurement is 1552081455.

This is okay in many contexts – it means that if we ask for a random number between 1 and 100, we can get any number in that range and which one depends on what algorithm we used and the exact time the computer generated the result. That’s random enough for something like viewing today’s forum posts in a “random” order instead of by most recent.

But obviously the drawback with this method is if you know the algorithm and the seed, you can calculate what the next “random” number will be, because it’s not truly random. This would not be acceptable for online slots – it wouldn’t be fair for either the player or casino if you could theoretically calculate what the result of a spin would be at some particular time in advance of it actually happening. Slots emphatically do not work that way.

So how do slots running on deterministic computers generate random results? Well, they still ultimately use pseudo-random number generators, but they are not seeded based on time. Instead they use what we call “cryptographically secure pseudo-random numbers” and without getting in to too much technical detail, these kind of RNGs are much closer to “true random” than the kind I’ve described above. Instead of using the time as the seed, these use a combination of multiple seed values which cannot possibly be known in advance. The particular sources vary, but can include quantum phenomena such as radioactivity, computer device noise such as the number of running processor threads and other things which are physically unpredictable and vary every fraction of a second. The statistical outcome of these CSPRNGs is indistinguishable from true random and cannot be cheated or predicted. This makes their use suitable for sensitive situations such as cryptography, or in this case random slots.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Mr B wrote:

argyl53 wrote:

For my 2 pence I still read regularly and post when something piques my interest but as I’m not gambling at the moment there’s less for me to share with people and I got tired of having the same conversations ad infinitum explaining how online slots are random, not compensated and not rigged. People still ask the questions of how slots work, how bonuses work etc. and bring up the topic but there’s only so many times I’m going to explain the maths or cite the Gambling Commission rules before it gets tiring, particularly when there’s always that group who’ll be like “okay well I understand the maths and the law now but I don’t care I still think it’s all rigged and also I continue to play slots every day even though I’m convinced it’s a conspiracy to take my money and programmed so I can’t win anyway”

That was always going to be a tense debate that has no official outcome. I am left feeling I can’t speak my mind on the subject in fear of a flame war happening again which is entertaining for the braindead and damaging for the forum vibe.

How slot games work under the hood is an interesting topic in a variety of ways, but one I’m personally done with to the extent that for me, I’ve posted all my knowledge on the subject, it’s there on the forum for anyone who searches and I don’t feel the need to cover the same ground again. So I’m just not participating in any more of those discussions, you won’t be getting any flaming from me. I guess my main point here is having had that discussion three or four times already and with me not gambling for the moment, there’s just not so much fresh material for me to post about. It’s the same with oh so-and-so game is difficult to bonus; yes I’m sure it is, that kind of post doesn’t hold any interest for me any more because they’re all the same outcome…some people get good bonuses, some people don’t.

I’ll still definitely post if I see something I want to respond to or enjoy talking about, I suppose I’ve just found a lot of threads lately are a bit repetitive. That’s not a dig at anyone, it’s a great forum, I love the community and the general sense of friendship and often the repetition is the result of new members asking old questions. That’s fine, I just don’t want to always be posting the same stuff.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

For my 2 pence I still read regularly and post when something piques my interest but as I’m not gambling at the moment there’s less for me to share with people and I got tired of having the same conversations ad infinitum explaining how online slots are random, not compensated and not rigged. People still ask the questions of how slots work, how bonuses work etc. and bring up the topic but there’s only so many times I’m going to explain the maths or cite the Gambling Commission rules before it gets tiring, particularly when there’s always that group who’ll be like “okay well I understand the maths and the law now but I don’t care I still think it’s all rigged and also I continue to play slots every day even though I’m convinced it’s a conspiracy to take my money and programmed so I can’t win anyway”

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

1. Why on earth would you dislike an hour long video because a name you don’t like was mentioned for all of a few seconds?

2. Why is Nick’s hit a huge talking point anyway? He was on £5 stake so it amounted to about a 5000x win; don’t get me wrong, that’s a great hit but it’s hardly record breaking as far as online slots go, people hit those figures all the time. You can see considerably bigger wins in the gallery on this site. I’ve had over 2000x a couple of times, who cares?

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Troll is a word that, generally speaking, has been diluted and gets thrown around freely these days. To me a troll is someone who deliberately posts controversial, abusive or inflammatory comments online with the specific intention of winding someone up and provoking an emotional reaction from them. But plenty of people these days will use it to mean “someone who repeatedly disagreed with me, or expressed an opinion I don’t like” and that’s definitely not trolling someone.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

I vape and after the initial £50 outlay on the vape itself, I’m only spending about £10 per month on liquids and coils, this is with enough usage to replace a 25-30 a day smoking habit. I buy 88vape liquids online (they’re dirt cheap, 10ml bottle for 99p), can recommend the rolling tobacco flavour at 16mg strength if you were a heavy smoker like me. Coils cost about £9 for a pack of five – each one lasts about 2 weeks, so I’m not getting through many of those in a month.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

This forum runs on bbpress, no! Should be possible to make other members moderators without giving them admin backend access, I could’ve sworn that was a supported user role. Long time since I’ve done anything with that software though, maybe I misremember.

 

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Nice job, I was doing the same thing but you’ve poked further than I’d bothered this far! Can you provide the mapping of numbers to symbols in the array representing the base game reelset (which appeared to me to  be the one with 177 symbols total for each reel?)

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Xbobmad wrote:

blacko1974 wrote:

What is that Lad?

 

It’s confirmation that I have had an awful run on slots so found the time to deposit elsewhere

Joking aside, its a positive pregnancy test, we’ve done 4 but it’s only early days.

It’ll be my first so I’ve got to start adulting more

And just like the slots, you also forgot to withdraw!

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

Seriously mate, I Gamstop’d after a really bad day where I tilted on live roulette and lost basically an entire month’s wages. Best decision I ever made. I miss slotting but simple fact is if you can’t control yourself and you’re losing money, then losing more money and upping your stakes chasing it and in any way playing to the extent you can’t afford to pay your rent and bills, you need the option to gamble taken away from you from a while. You won’t get back the money you’ve lost, whether you carry on gambling or not, but if you stop you will financially recover over time and feel a lot happier and healthier for it.

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

https://www.gamstop.co.uk/

[ar argyl53 WANTED $419 Outlaw]

I had a lot of luck on Bonanza, personal RTP on that game was more than 100%. But you need to know what you’re playing; Bonanza will float even a small balance for hundreds of spins, but the chance of hitting a bonus in 100 spins is tiny, the chance of hitting a mammoth bonus negligible. When it does pay, though, it can pay 5000, 10000x plus. It’s advertised as an ultra volatile game.

Know your games and choose what you to play accordingly. Bonanza is simply not a game you give 2000 spins and expect to make a profit at the end.

[Author]

Posts