Hello! Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a nice break and I hope you are all looking forward to resuming a more regular posting schedule!

Huzzah!  And you're damn right!

Happy New Year everyone.

Welp, this'll be interesting, however it turns out.

Ah, drek...I just got a client killed. That's not going to look good.

Precisely my thought mate.  I'm sitting here staring at something that I know is a terrible idea, but it would be hilarious... so I'm gonna do it.

Mah beer run has gone to shit.


I meant that literally, the target has resorted to throwing poop.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:28, Sun 16 Jan 2022.

*Snorts*

Sounds like a heck of a good time.  I mean thank your lucky stars that it's not on fire?

I'm going to be kicking off a group thread soon enough. I know you're all chilling in your own little paradises but you'll be given the opportunity to encounter and interact with one another.

While you're all going to be forced into a situation, that doesn't mean you have to stay in that situation so if you're not feeling it there will be a chance to bow out.

Awesome, can't wait to see everyone in the flesh as it were!

WTF dice roller!?  I just rolled a total of 306 dice (rolling both sides) while trying to break through this barrier with acid fists.  I got 71 total hits.  Average for 306 dice would be 102.

Let's see, wolfram alpha binomial distribution calculator.  p=0.333333 (one third chance of a hit.) n=306.  Mean is 102, Standard Deviation is 8.24621, 102-71=31, 31/stddev=3.76.

There's a 99.9989% chance to do better than that.  Literally one in a hundred thousand odds of luck that bad.


What the actual fuck RPOL!?
This message was last edited by the player at 22:22, Sun 30 Jan 2022.

Going back and collecting the data from every roll I can see, including other players, it's 845 dice with 248 hits.  The mean is 281, the standard deviation is 13.7.  The game as a whole is 2.4 standard deviations low.  It's not just me, the dice roller is broken.


I'm going to ignore that critical glitch, and I'm not going to spend edge to do so.  The dice are weighted.  Not just a little weighted, they're a lot weighted.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:15, Sun 30 Jan 2022.

Interesting, rolling 100d6 at a time without recording the individual dice, it's really close to what the average should be.  644 hits on 2000 dice, 2000/3=666.66

But when I record individual dice, I get 126 hits on 400 dice (When recording, you're limited to 20 dice per roll, hence the smaller number of dice tested.)  On 400 dice, the mean is 133.33, with a standard deviation of 9.42809.  That's actually off by less than one standard deviation.  Hmm, hypothesis, the dice get more weighted when rolling fewer.  One moment while I roll 10d6 40 times.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:44, Sun 30 Jan 2022.

Well, hit the button one too many times, ah well, 410 d6's works just fine.  Mean is 136.667, standard deviation is 9.54521, actual hits is 148...

Huh, that's actually higher than average?  Interesting.  Wonder what happens if I roll 8d6 a bunch more times.

Edit: Well, with 416 d6's rolled 8 at a time, it's a bit low agian, but within reason.  Something's still hinky.  Why does it act so differently when I roll a bunch of the same roll vs when we've all been rolling a few dice here and there?


Do we seriously need to warm the dice up first to get valid results!?
This message was last edited by the player at 23:53, Sun 30 Jan 2022.

The dice roller is random. The issue is that it is randomized over large sets of numbers. Any given roll, even with hundreds of dice involved, still can drift one way or another which is actually a better sign that it is randomized.

If you rolled 100 dice and it always averaged out to 50 then you don't have a truly random dice roller.

If you rolled 100 dice and it was always higher than average or lower than average then you don't have a truly random dice roller.

But if you rolled 100 dice over and over again and sometimes it rolled a bit high, sometimes it rolled a bit low, there was this one bit where it rolled 100 like 5 times in a row...that is a random dice roller.

Dilbert did a comic on this

I also saw a great comment about this topic awhile ago:



If you don't know if a set of roll will steer higher or lower or meet the average...congrats its random!

In reply to Mr. Johnson (msg # 137):

A coin that alternates flipping 100 head and 100 tails isn't a fair coin, despite averaging out in the long term.

3.76 standard deviations low over 306 rolls is a streak bad enough you wouldn't expect to see it more than once in Thirty Million rolls.  This is "Deserving of further research" levels of improbable.

I created a test game so I could spam the roller there without messing it up here.  I'm up to 22900 d6 rolled.

Measuring with a rolling window of 100 rolls, I have four stretches that are more than three sigma off from the mean.  3 sigma is p=0.00135, so there should only be a 30% chance of seeing one such streak, good or bad.  (22900 rolls / 100 window size) = 229.  229*0.00135=0.30915 expected occurances.

Measuring with a rolling window of 200 rolls, I have five stretches that are more than three sigma off from the mean.  (longer stretches of good or bad luck are less likely, even if a subset of that streak is otherwise fine.  So 2 stretches of 100 rolls that are within 3sigma might not be when back to back.)  3 sigma is still p=0.00135, but the spans are twice the width.  So I should only have a 15% chance of seeing one.  I have FIVE.

Measuring with a rolling window of 300 rolls, I only have 1 stretch that's more than 3 sigma away from the mean, but I have twelve that are more than 2.5 sigma away from the mean.  The 3 sigma outlier only has a 10% chance of happening in 22900 rolls.  The 2.5 sigma outliers have p=0.00621, which gives a 47% chance of seeing one in 22900 rolls.  I have twelve of them, not one.


This roller is as streaky as a drag strip.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:21, Mon 31 Jan 2022.

But the question is this

1) Can you predict when a streak will happen?

2) Can you predict if the streak will roll high or roll low?

Every couple thousand rolls it looks like.  The pattern skips a couple times, but it's there.  I have my spreadsheet set to highlight 2, 2.5, and 3 standard deviations.  The streaks that only get to +/- 2 are much more common, they're not always as big, but they're easier to see patterns in.

And ~3/4 of them are a low streak.


Of course, when I'm not rolling thousands of dice in a row, other people are making use of that generator, so I don't know where in that pattern I'm starting on any given roll.  It's only when making a bunch of rolls in quick succession that we'd see that.

And now that I know it's streaky, I know to just stop rolling for a while if there's a streak of WTF!? level 'luck'.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:29, Mon 31 Jan 2022.

Welp, the shit, and the target, are on fire.  Time to exit the run.

Oof I finally have time to post. So early this week my father-in-law's house burned down. Everyone is fine but he also was a bit of a hoarder so the whole family has been called in to sort through the charred and soggy remains.

I'm fine, everyone is fine. I apologize for not posting sooner but pretty much I've been coming home, eating, and going to bed only to wake up and head back out again. No computer, no down time. Well, that's not entirely true but the downtime I did have was spent in a comatose state on the couch watching trash TV mentally preparing for the next day.

Anyway we are finally getting ahead of the curve on dealing with the fire and I finally have enough sleep and energy to fire up the computer and let you all know where the hell I've been for the past week.

I can't promise a post today or tomorrow. It's high on my to-do list but things are looking like it should return more to normal soon. Again, bear with me, family emergency yadda yadda yadda. The important thing is I'm still here, no worries.

Meatspace matters the most, and family comes first.  Hang in there omae.

Drek. Sorry to hear about your father-in-law's misfortune, Boss.

RL comes first, as always.

We can wait.

No problem, take it easy.

That's a hell of a time.  At least he has family who can and will come help.

I come here hat in hand to apologize for the slowness of updates. It's the usual trifecta: work, illness, holidays. I'm here but once we push through the next week or so things should speed back up again.

I recently switched jobs which is why this whole year has been slow but I'm getting my feet under me and right now I know I am lucky to manage 1-2 updates a week but I really feel like in a week or so we can get that pushed up to 3-4 or even...dare I say it...5 a week?