Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[silverskull39]

well that really depends on the 4th dimension of time. probability suggests that given enough time, this will happen, but it could have been one of the first planets formed or it could be the last. Also, are we speaking relative to the planet's age, or relative to the universe's? those answers are very, very different.

[Supercharazad]

I'm going to say one thing here before I really comment, in the words of some random guy somewhere

"pics or it didn't happen"

PICS NAO!

[NW_Kohaku]

aight, here's how it works.

Either you are going to be able to gen the same world twice in a row or you aren't.  Two possibilities.  ie. a 50% chance of either.

Now to find actual probability of this occurance I will make up some numbers; let's say there are 1 million DF players who each generate an average of 10 worlds a week.

Therefore the odds that at least one world will be a duplicate of the one before it is
(1-(.5^(10^7)))
or damn near 100%.  Expected value of course is .5*(10^7) or 5,000,000
I would go on to calculate standard deviation and perhaps even a proof of normality(though it's not necissary here). But its the weekend

And I just broke probability

This reminds me of that guy who was going around saying the Large Hadron Collidor would destroy the world, because, "No matter how improbable the scientists said it was that a "mini black hole" would be created, there was a chance that it would occur.  That means, either it would occur or it wouldn't.  Therefore, it has a 50% chance of destroying the world."

I remember Daily Show interviewing this guy... he was a middle school physics teacher, and was repeatedly interviewed by the major news networks for his view on this.

Jason Jones was the only one who replied with "... I'm no mathmatician, but I'm pretty sure probability doesn't work that way."

[SkyRender]

 Ah yes, the old "black or white" argument that people with a poor grasp of statistics (or even proper logic) use.  I'm not sure when the assumption came about that the odds of something happening or not happening is always a perfect 50/50 split, but it's pretty silly when you consider that pretty much every "will or won't" scenario there is has been distilled artificially down to that level from a whole lot of other variables.  For whatever reason, the idea of a scenario like that having one of the two possibilities be at 0.000000000002% odds of happening is an impossible thing for them to grasp.

 I guess that's how lotteries and casinos stay in business, though...

[Blackburn]

I blame coins.

[silverskull39]

I blame general human stupidity.

After all, was it not Einstein who said, "There are only two things that are certain; That the universe exists, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe."

[Blackburn]

I blame general human stupidity.

After all, was it not Einstein who said, "There are only two things that are certain; That the universe exists, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe."

That too.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ah yes, the old "black or white" argument that people with a poor grasp of statistics (or even proper logic) use.  I'm not sure when the assumption came about that the odds of something happening or not happening is always a perfect 50/50 split, but it's pretty silly when you consider that pretty much every "will or won't" scenario there is has been distilled artificially down to that level from a whole lot of other variables.  For whatever reason, the idea of a scenario like that having one of the two possibilities be at 0.000000000002% odds of happening is an impossible thing for them to grasp.

 I guess that's how lotteries and casinos stay in business, though...

Actually, lotteries and casinos remain in existence because of a human belief in magic, or at least personal exceptionalism.

Raffles and lotteries will always let you pick your own numbers that you bet upon.  Lotteries that let you pick your own numbers will sell about five times as many tickets as lotteries that don't.  The belief that people have a "lucky number" that will somehow override all rationality that any one given number is as probable as any other is THAT strong.

[doctorspoof]

Actually, lotteries and casinos remain in existence because of a human belief in magic, or at least personal exceptionalism.

Lotteries are just a tax on people who don't understand statistics and probability.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

If the world went to where you can embark then the seed numbers are further limited because many seeds are in fact non-operable in world creation because of some factor making it impossible to use for game play. honestly have you ever looked at the number of reject worlds? In vanilla you can get quite a few so its not like you are getting a number in consecutive order. If you include this in its less of he got the same seed twice in a row but instead he got it then a hundred or so tries later he got it again so this will improve the chances some. On top of this he was searching for specific things and genning many worlds one right after another upping the chances of this happening. to go to the lottery example it would be like buying a few hundred lottery tickets and happening to win. you still got lucky but you tipped it in your favor a little bit.

[Trigonous]

I'm going to say one thing here before I really comment, in the words of some random guy somewhere

"pics or it didn't happen"

PICS NAO!

I did think of this, but really, what would I show?  Pics of the same world twice?



And with the 50/50 thing, given enough time (I.E. inifity) if there is a chance something will happen, it will, eventually.  However, only if given infinity.  And since that isn't going to happen...

[NW_Kohaku]

If the world went to where you can embark then the seed numbers are further limited because many seeds are in fact non-operable in world creation because of some factor making it impossible to use for game play. honestly have you ever looked at the number of reject worlds? In vanilla you can get quite a few so its not like you are getting a number in consecutive order. If you include this in its less of he got the same seed twice in a row but instead he got it then a hundred or so tries later he got it again so this will improve the chances some. On top of this he was searching for specific things and genning many worlds one right after another upping the chances of this happening. to go to the lottery example it would be like buying a few hundred lottery tickets and happening to win. you still got lucky but you tipped it in your favor a little bit.

... even if you have a few hundred shots at it, you're still talking about a roughly one-in-tens-of-millions chance.

Incidentally, that's roughly the same odds of winning most major state lotteries.

[G-Flex]

For what it's worth, a lot of random number generators are really, really bad.

For instance, I once had some IRC dicebot that I could tell had a bad RNG behind it simply by rolling a few sets of d10s. That's bad.

In fact, it's very likely that it was using the standard Windows C++ rand() function, which is known to be kind of crappy. If DF uses this, then it generating the same seed twice might be likely.

Of course, this depends entirely on how the seed itself is generated. If the RNG used to make the seed seeds itself with the current time or something like that every single time worldgen begins, or if the RNG is actually good, then.. this seems much less likely, so I don't know.


Of course, more likely than this by far is someone accidentally using the same seed they used last time.

... even if you have a few hundred shots at it, you're still talking about a roughly one-in-tens-of-millions chance.

Incidentally, that's roughly the same odds of winning most major state lotteries.

Note what I said above. Some RNG implementations have rather noticeable patterns to them. Of course, again, user error (or some weird bug in DF) is still more likely.