Smuggler Archive
Thread: Theory of slicing results and probabilities
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Bermag
Tue Mar 08, 2005 5:31 am
#27
SpinningCloud wrote:
Interestingly, not that I believe SOE used it, there is a plug-in card for PCs that uses a pair of noisy zener diodes to generate true random numbers. There is also an online service that serves true random numbers over the web using radioactive decay. If i were doing even a psuedo-random number today I think I'd considerreaquiring the seed through the online service periodically, especially if the RNG was used in any kind of a security sensitive environment.
I think that would be over-kill to do. Using current time in milliseconds as seed value should be secure enough, it would be random in all practical use of it and impossible to predict the outcome.
SpinningCloud
Tue Mar 08, 2005 7:11 am
#28
Bermag; "I think that would be over-kill to do. Using current time in milliseconds as seed value should be secure enough, it would be random in all practical use of it and impossible to predict the outcome."
Yeah, I just mentioned it because I thought it was interesting. I've used the RTC for seeds many times...surprising how many people overlook that.
Dragon942
Tue Mar 08, 2005 8:45 am
#29
Not neccesarily. I recently ran into a problem where I had generated hundreds ofthousands of random numbers and groups came outthat were exactly the same because they were all using the same time in milliseconds as the seed since it was running so fast (speed was essential in this program because it runs in real-time). I wonder if two people sliced something at the exact same time (theoretically) if they would get the same slice
Bermag wrote:
I think that would be over-kill to do. Using current time in milliseconds as seed value should be secure enough, it would be random in all practical use of it and impossible to predict the outcome.
SpinningCloud
Tue Mar 08, 2005 8:56 am
#30
I wasn't taking him literally that he rounded to the nearest millisecond. If you use the system clock you can get granularity much finer than a millisecond. And of course you don't seed it every time you need a random number either.
In an application like SWG you also have to realize that the subset of the RNG sequence any one player will see will have another layer of randomness imposed on it since many players will be independently asking for subsets of that RNG sequence. The frequency and period of those subsets will be wholey unpredictable by any other requesting client. So what started out as pseudo random will, for any one client, end up being truely random.
GoldMemberBria
Tue Mar 08, 2005 12:24 pm
#31
I personally subscribe to a more hollistic interpretation of probability theory. For example, we all know that the probability of a slice of dropped toast landing butter-side-down is directly proportional to the value of the carpet, and inversely proportional to the length of time it has been since the carpet has been cleaned. Applying those axiums to SWG weapon slicing the odds of an exceptional slice is most certainly inversely proportional to the quality of the weapon being sliced.
/bow
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