Biology and RNGs

[Count Room]

These posts were copied from another thread to create a new thread here, because this is a "different" (and even unique) subject. It began with this post by Count Room:

Actually, you just explained the secret that may work for you: When you are losing a string of hands, just let go of the button, adjust your chair for a few seconds, and resume! Rinse and repeat as needed.

There could be some archaic explanation such that movement of your hips stimulated blood flow for a few moments through your arm & button pressing hand, enabling the newly-dilated blood vessels to relax momentarily and to unconsciously press the button at a more pleasurable time..

EDIT: Keep in mind you don't have to hit a royal every time you were sloshing around adjusting your chair. If you had 300 chair adjustments and 299 were total misses (with nary a paying pair!) and one was a royal, it's still a +EV button-timing preparation movement, isn't it?

And what follows is a comment from me and the rest of the posts.
---Alan Mendelson

winner winner winner "super advantage play strategy of the week" winner winner winner

Also one of the funniest things I ever read.

This may come across as a shock, Alan, but I was actually being semi-serious. Beyond a certain plateau of skill level in video poker, the conventional wisdom is that there is absolutely no way to improve your game beyond using either conventional +EV strategy or one of Rob's systems/special plays/whatever (ie. you can't possibly time button presses).

But how do we really know this for sure? Unless you find a software glitch such as the one John Kane & Andre Nestor found or did some form of outright cheating, I still maintain that the next frontier of improving one's VP game is timing the button presses better. There really could be something worth looking into in terms of human biology interacting with electronic machines that just isn't known or understood yet.

Yes, it's a questionable and debatable idea just like trying to control dice throws in craps....questionable, but with tantalizing possibilities for the intrepid souls out there wading into the unknown. (but don't quit your day job!)

[redietz]

I mentioned this very briefly in a previous post somewhere, but let me expand on it. What Count Room was talking about in the post about timing has been investigated by paranormal researchers. I don't personally think the evidence, as of 20 years ago, was very convincing, but some people did.

Back in the mid-80's, I actually visited a laboratory in Princeton that was doing just what Count was talking about -- checking for statistical anomalies with people trying to influence RNG's or time their responses to RNGs. I was briefly wired to some machines and we had a couple of sample runs so they could show me what it was like to work with the machines.

I'm honestly not up to date on what kind of research is currently being done like this, but the topic is real. According to the published research, some of the results back in the 80's were impressive. I have a hard time buying into the concept, but the work is being done.

So no, Count Room, you're not off base to bring up this kind of stuff.

[Count Room]

I mentioned this very briefly in a previous post somewhere, but let me expand on it. What Count Room was talking about in the post about timing has been investigated by paranormal researchers. I don't personally think the evidence, as of 20 years ago, was very convincing, but some people did.

Back in the mid-80's, I actually visited a laboratory in Princeton that was doing just what Count was talking about -- checking for statistical anomalies with people trying to influence RNG's or time their responses to RNGs. I was briefly wired to some machines and we had a couple of sample runs so they could show me what it was like to work with the machines.

I'm honestly not up to date on what kind of research is currently being done like this, but the topic is real. According to the published research, some of the results back in the 80's were impressive. I have a hard time buying into the concept, but the work is being done.

So no, Count Room, you're not off base to bring up this kind of stuff.

Red: I'm not even sure if this could even be considered a paranormal phenomenon (maybe, maybe not!).

Remember Rob's infamous 5th card flipover testing?

On a standard IGT machine why not try each of ten fingers pressing the DEAL/DRAW button for a sample of 100,000 hands of 9/6 Jacks or Better (for each finger, totalling a million hands unless you've been in an industrial accident) ...It would be a good idea to ignore straight flushes and royal flushes as insignificant outliers and focus on 4-of-a-kinds or lower.

If any finger's 100,000 hand run performs statistically better or worse than the other fingers, maybe it could start to show that there is a biological basis for good/bad luck at the machines depending on body position, etc.?

Note that I am NOT saying one would use the "best performing finger" as a result of this test. A test such as this would only be an exploratory test to help show whether or not biology and/or body positions can influence a day's session as a winner (or not).

[seemoreroyals]

Interesting discussion, but can we agree in the end that some people are just luckier than others? I am open to the idea that there are things one can do to change ones luck. If you are grinding on a machine and getting nothing but bad hands it seems to me that your rhythm may be off by just a bit and you have to do something to get back into a positive flow. Change your speed. Go to the restroom. Change machines. Change games you are playing on the machine. Switch fingers with which you are pressing the deal draw button. Etc. , etc. Much like a basketball coach will call a timeout when his team has just given up a 10 point run.

Other people are not as analytical and seem to expect to win and are surprised when they don't. They don't and never have used video poker training programs yet go to the casinos and seem to do quite well. They do not hold optimal holds. Some times I wonder if these RNG's have become so sophisticated that they are hiding royal flushes and 4oak's in hands where it would make sense to not go for the royal or to hold the two pairs rather than the one pair and go for the 4oak. That way they could still say that their EV on a 9/6 DDB machine for instance was 98.98%. In other words, are they really random in every respect?

[arcimede$]

No, they wouldn't be random. Randomness would be violated at both ends. Better results on certain holds and worse results on other holds.

[Alan Mendelson]

What I think would be interesting is if a game maker came out with a "skill version" of video poker that would actually display the cards whizzing by with the RNG. Now, granted it might be hundreds or thousands of cards per second for the deal, but I think it would become an interesting game if you only had one card to draw. To create such a game, I think a few things need to be known:

1. Is the speed of the RNG "slow enough" to make it even possible for the images to register as they flash on a screen?
2. Is there a screen/monitor that is fast enough to show X-number of images per second?
3. How would it change the odds/pays of the game?

[Count Room]

What I think would be interesting is if a game maker came out with a "skill version" of video poker that would actually display the cards whizzing by with the RNG. Now, granted it might be hundreds or thousands of cards per second for the deal, but I think it would become an interesting game if you only had one card to draw. To create such a game, I think a few things need to be known:

1. Is the speed of the RNG "slow enough" to make it even possible for the images to register as they flash on a screen?
2. Is there a screen/monitor that is fast enough to show X-number of images per second?
3. How would it change the odds/pays of the game?

Alan: The truth of the matter (as far as I know, but I could be corrected by better sources) is that modern RNG's have exceptionally fast processors running through numbers by the nanosecond. It would be impossible for the naked eye to discern any change in digits even if you could see the numbers whizzing by. You would just see a solid number and the actual odds wouldn't be different from that perspective.

HOWEVER, my point is simply that there is an upper plateau in skill level when playing VP either through standard +EV play or through Rob Singer's methods, etc. The only way to take your game beyond this point is to look at the very timing of pressing a DEAL/DRAW button.

Is it a fool's errand? Maybe, but I really don't know for sure and I feel there are some important things yet to be discovered in terms of biological influences on session results.

I'm afraid I can't go any further than this at the moment. I've already suggested a research experiment using 10 different fingers. Beyond that, I am still just a casual gambler and I don't have any agenda aside from curiously exploring the unknown.

[arcimede$]

The timing of deal/draw requires a knowledge of BOTH the RNG algorithm and where in the RNG process you are located. Neither of these are known and even with this knowledge the speed of the processor makes timing difficult.

When this was tried and successfully implemented 20 years ago the people reverse engineered the code to learn the algorithm. Based on sequences of a few hands they could determine where they were located in the RNG sequence since continuous shuffle was not implemented. Since the processors of the time were slower, they could hit their target enough to make it very profitable.

[Count Room]

Arci:

Would you believe me if I told you I was the one that initially introduced that chapter from Kevin Mitnick's book to both you and Rob a long time ago on VPFree? (You don't have to believe me, but I did. I had less gray in my beard when you and Rob started arguing, LOL!)

[regnis]

I have done quite a bit of reading on Mitnick et al. They determined that the RNG was actually not random. Has the RNG changed since then so that there is true randomness? If so--do we have any proof?


This was never referenced in all those old threads debating whether we have true randomness.

[arcimede$]

The algorithm used in the old machines is what is called pseudo-random. This is not new news.

[regnis]

cut the double talk--if it isn't random then all your math is inapplicable. Is it random or not, and has anything changed since they proved it was not random.

[Alan Mendelson]

I think what Arc is saying is that the older machines were not random... they were pseudo random. The new machines are completely random.

The new machines with the continuous shuffle are also fairer than the old machines which had squential deals or shadow cards, because now every card has an equal chance of being selected on the draw.

[regnis]

Here is an excerpt from Mitnick's book. So again, my question is have they corrected this and if so, how. Is it just the continuous shuffle rather than the 10 card deal. And that doesn't change the randomness, that just makes it harder to crack the code. So again, my question is what proof do we have that the deal is random when Mitnick proved otherwise.

"So the numbers produced were not truly random. But Alex thinks there’s a good reason why this has to be so:

If it’s truly random, they can’t set the odds. They can’t verify what the odds really are. Some machines gave sequential royal flushes. They shouldn’t happen at all. So the designers want to be able to verify that they have the right statistics or they feel like they don’t have control over the game. "

[arcimede$]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness

"Pseudorandom sequences typically exhibit statistical randomness while being generated by an entirely deterministic causal process."

In other words, the results one sees will still match those of a completely random machine.

[Alan Mendelson]

Here is an excerpt from Mitnick's book. So again, my question is have they corrected this and if so, how. Is it just the continuous shuffle rather than the 10 card deal. And that doesn't change the randomness, that just makes it harder to crack the code. So again, my question is what proof do we have that the deal is random when Mitnick proved otherwise.

"So the numbers produced were not truly random. But Alex thinks there’s a good reason why this has to be so:

If it’s truly random, they can’t set the odds. They can’t verify what the odds really are. Some machines gave sequential royal flushes. They shouldn’t happen at all. So the designers want to be able to verify that they have the right statistics or they feel like they don’t have control over the game. "

Frankly, I don't understand why you think why this quote is significant? I don't see any facts there that would tell me the machines are not random. I see a comment that is only opinion.

In video poker odds are not set by what cards show up. Odds are set by the paytable based on a perfect distribution of the cards over time. This means that a JOB game with a pay table of 99.54% in reality might never be 99.54%. The paytable, in reality, only gives the "potential long term payback." And that really is the same with slots.

A slot machine with an advertised 99% return might never really have a 99% return.

Let's take a gambler: You might play a JOB game with a 99.54% return but based on your own play -- your holds, your draws, and your luck -- you might walk away with 1,000% return or you might walk away losing your whole bankroll.

I think the bottom line comes down to this: treat paybacks and returns as "possible" and not "expected." And if you don't trust the RNGs stick to table games.

[regnis]

Alan--Mitnick et. al. found that there was a set sequence and that it was not truly a random draw. I am questioning whether the games are now in fact random or if the protections within the chip to prevent someone like him from taking advantage of the sequence have been improved. Mitnick was able to hit the casinos for 100's of thousands of dollars due to the non-randomness---it was not just his opinion it was a fact.

So again, have they changed the chip or RNG to a true random draw? And if you say yes, is that opinion or is it fact.

I have no preconceived notion here---I just found his story to be interesting and I wondered if anything really has changed.

[Alan Mendelson]

First question: when was the Mitnick article published? Because there was a time when the machines did have a code or sequence which was detectable. That was changed.

[arcimede$]

This situation happened in the early 90s. This was before continuous shuffle and some think was the impetus for the change. I believe the pRNG was 32 bits giving a fixed sequence of 4 billion hands. However, when you start playing you could be anywhere within those 4 billion hands.

[regnis]

Arci-I'll never understand the programming aspect of this. They were able to determine where the RNG was among whatever the number of billion hands there were. They then knew what the next cards were. Since this was at a time when 10 cards were dealt, they would often discard a pair of aces because the result would be better based upon the cards dealt behind the aces, and this was one concern they had with the "eye in the sky". So do we know that whatever pattern they determined has been fixed, or does the continuous shuffle solve the problem. Again, just trying to figure out if the non-randomness still exists, or are the safeguards against using it to ones advantage just better. They did state with no uncertainty that the RNG was not random.

I know it probably doesn't matter to me as I am not capable of taking advantage of any programming weaknesses, but I have never believed that VP is random and just found this interesting. Would still like to know if there is any reason to believe that something was changed to ensure randomness rather than just extra safeguards to prevent someone from taking advantage of the non-randomness.