Re: [Bug-gnubg] random dice generator? hahahaaa

[Chris Wilson]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 11:42 PM, Philippe Michel <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sat, 19 Aug 2017, tchow wrote:

The other feature that might be interesting is to allow players to
receive a handicap, not by having the computer make mistakes, but by
having the dice rigged in their favor.

IMHO, the only thing worth implementing at the gnubg level would be the
possiility to call an external RNG provided as a python function.

I'm not familiar with the python-C interfaces, and currently this is used the
other way, accessing internal gnubg routines and data structures from
python scripts, but I assume the reverse is possible.

Then anyone interested enough could use his preferred algorithm, or a driver for
this kind of device : http://ubld.it/truerng_v3

Simple unbalanced dice (SHG style) would be easy to implement, schemes like the
one described by Timothy would be trickier, needing to evaluate the 21 rolls
before choosing one, but certainly doable (we could get rid of the ridiculous
"dice manipulation" option and offer it as an example python code :-).

I think there's an easier solution to this well-worn topic and it should be easy to implement.

I have a Windows program called Super_PI that was written in 1995. I've kept it around this long because I use it as an objective means of rating computer builds and overclocking tweaks. The program generates 33,554,432 digits of PI. It currently takes 8 minutes and 15 seconds on my system and it dumps the output to a text file. Now, strip the digits 0, 7, 8, 9 and you have a perfect file of truly random numbers. Any number of methods can be used to retrieve a valid roll from the file. Offer the numbers in suitable text blocks available as an additional download from the website and trigger a program option to use those numbers and it should end the argument.

Here are some comments that come with the ZIP file.

"In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi and he collaborated with Dr. Y.Kanada at the computer center, the University of Tokyo. This record should be the current world record. ( Details is shown in the windows help. ) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environment such as Windows NT and Windows 95. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with Pentium 90MHz, 40MB main memory and 340MB available storage. The software is free and the circulation of program is also free!"

To think it used to take 3 DAYS to generate that many digits! :-)

The archive also includes some C++ code. Contact me if you wish a copy of the program.