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[Trigonous]

I'm currently in the gen-worlds-'till-I-find-something stage of playing, and I just genned the same world twice.  No, I haven't messed with world_gen.txt.  The naming was different, but I'm 100% certain it was the same world I just had.  I even embarked in the same spot to confirm it, and all the features were still there.   I wasn't sure this was possible, what with those massive seed numbers...

Genning another world produced something different...

[Aachen]

If it was impossible, I'd believe you. But it's just improbable.

At any rate, is it possible you tweaked the settings, without noticing, to use the same seed when you generated the world the second time? Unlikely, I know, but .... well, what happened was unlikely too.

[Hyndis]

Its not improbably, its almost a certainty. Its just the odds of it being you are slim.

Consider how many people play DF. How many worlds are generated. There is a large but finite number of seeds.

There will be duplicate worlds. Thats not a question, that is almost a certainty.

[BigD145]

Your CPU thinks it knows the meaning of the word "random", but it really doesn't.

[Aachen]

Its not improbably, its almost a certainty. Its just the odds of it being you are slim.

Consider how many people play DF. How many worlds are generated. There is a large but finite number of seeds.

There will be duplicate worlds. Thats not a question, that is almost a certainty.

It's almost a certainty that someone will, in generating a world, have the same seed randomly chosen twice in a row? I haven't checked to see how large the seed-pool is, but my gut reaction is "no it isn't!"

Someone out there more versed in statistics, help!

Also, don't "It's almost certain" and "The odds are slim" contradict each other?

To me, something "almost certain" is very likely, say 97-100 percent chance, to occur.

I'm not saying the same world is never generated, and I don't think that was the OP's thought either. I'm saying that (barring deliberate settings), having the same world seed chosen twice consecutively isn't going to happen all too often.

[Ottofar]

There is a near-infinite number of worlds, but not all of them are habitable. Therefore there must be a finite number of habitable worlds. When you deduct any finite number from infinite, you have near-infinite number, which is practically infinite. Any finite number divided by infinity is practically zero Therefore there are practically not habitable worlds. Therefore the average population of DF worlds is zero, and every NPC you meet is a bug that you should fix, to help Toady One.

This is how I justify my 200-innocent person kill lists in adventure mode.

[Elijah]

Define near-infinite......

It sounds like a mere justification for all the murderous fun. 

[darkflagrance]

The non-random random number generator that DF uses probably got borked by any number of factors in computers that hose probability.

It may not be that an improbably result occurred, but that a glitch in the system or computer temporarily broke the RNG.

[kotekzot]

Its not improbably, its almost a certainty. Its just the odds of it being you are slim.

Consider how many people play DF. How many worlds are generated. There is a large but finite number of seeds.

There will be duplicate worlds. Thats not a question, that is almost a certainty.

It's almost a certainty that someone will, in generating a world, have the same seed randomly chosen twice in a row? I haven't checked to see how large the seed-pool is, but my gut reaction is "no it isn't!"

Someone out there more versed in statistics, help!

Also, don't "It's almost certain" and "The odds are slim" contradict each other?

To me, something "almost certain" is very likely, say 97-100 percent chance, to occur.

I'm not saying the same world is never generated, and I don't think that was the OP's thought either. I'm saying that (barring deliberate settings), having the same world seed chosen twice consecutively isn't going to happen all too often.

Given enough time, a monkey with a typewriter will write "War and Peace".

[Tarran]

Well, look at it this way, even changing one setting even slightly will give you a different set of worlds, say I add 1 to minimum salvagry, ALL of those worlds will be different from their 0-level minimum salvagry set.

[kotekzot]

Your point being?

[Aachen]

Given enough time, a monkey with a typewriter will write "War and Peace".

And consume an infinite amount of monkey food. Leaving you with an infinite monkey-food bill. Your point?

[kotekzot]

My point is that if you do something enough times the improbable result will almost certainly happen.

[Quatch]

Vastly more probable than selecting the same sequence in the RNG is user error or a bug in Df. Even if the RNG wasn't initialized it would not gen the same sequence (unlikely in extreme).

[Sir Broccoli]

Its not improbably, its almost a certainty. Its just the odds of it being you are slim.

Consider how many people play DF. How many worlds are generated. There is a large but finite number of seeds.

There will be duplicate worlds. Thats not a question, that is almost a certainty.

It's almost a certainty that someone will, in generating a world, have the same seed randomly chosen twice in a row? I haven't checked to see how large the seed-pool is, but my gut reaction is "no it isn't!"

Someone out there more versed in statistics, help!

Also, don't "It's almost certain" and "The odds are slim" contradict each other?

To me, something "almost certain" is very likely, say 97-100 percent chance, to occur.

I'm not saying the same world is never generated, and I don't think that was the OP's thought either. I'm saying that (barring deliberate settings), having the same world seed chosen twice consecutively isn't going to happen all too often.

Let's say you're in a group of ten million people, each of them has a coin. If each of them would flip that coin ten times it's almost certain that one of these ten million people flipped ten heads in a row. The odds of you being that person, however, are very, very slim.
This is pretty much the same sitation. The odds of someone getting the same seed two times in a row are slim, but when done in mass scale it's bound to happen somewhere.