Technical question: Type of randomness for shinies.

[Doctor]

[XanarchyNL]

I love this community, never change

[KiritoHakz]

5 hours ago, XanarchyNL said:

I love this community, never change

I know there are legends here. But this is a noob error.

Anyway im not interested in working with you anymore. Im launching my own bussines. Ty to all.

[Seth]

2 hours ago, KiritoHakz said:

I know there are legends here. But this is a noob error.

Anyway im not interested in working with you anymore. Im launching my own bussines. Ty to all.

Best of luck. If it's Digimon, please send me the link.

[AlphaWeetu]

2 hours ago, KiritoHakz said:

I know there are legends here. But this is a noob error.

Anyway im not interested in working with you anymore. Im launching my own bussines. Ty to all.

Hope your new circus goes around my town any time soon🙏

[Goku]

10 hours ago, AlphaWeetu said:

Hope your new circus goes around my town any time soon🙏

Seems very entertaining. I'll pay top dollar. Mans most definitely got what it takes. He's got my support!

[XanarchyNL]

13 hours ago, KiritoHakz said:

I know there are legends here. But this is a noob error.

Anyway im not interested in working with you anymore. Im launching my own bussines. Ty to all.

Imagine thinking this dev team was gonna work with you in the first place. Delusion to the maximum.

[Sourcerer]

Gotta ramp up those rookie numbers.
Devs are only interested in programming languages count more than or equal to 69, and less than 420 if you can ditch out binary.

Edited January 7 by Sourcerer

[Bearminator]

On 1/7/2024 at 3:18 AM, KiritoHakz said:

I know there are legends here. But this is a noob error.

Anyway im not interested in working with you anymore. Im launching my own bussines. Ty to all.

Hi!

 

Dev team is not recruiting, and just to confirm no dev has replied to this thread.

I wish you luck with any project and hope you will have fun in PokeMMO anyway.

As for randomness, quoted Desu's post is probably best I can give you, since it doesnt seem like it was answered any other way.
Since the thread went to unnecessary insults, I will close it. 

[Kyu]

On 1/3/2024 at 9:19 PM, Damian said:

By way of clarification, I am a software industry professional with a degree in computing and software systems from a world leading university.

 

Patterns of unlikely statistically independent events are exactly what one would expect from a random system. Humans are notoriously bad at distinguishing (effectively) truly random behaviour from patterned or distributed behaviour.  For example, consider the following two images:

 

Which image do you think represents a random distribution of dots, and which represents an ordered pattern being generated?

 

The image on the left is randomly generated; the image on the right is not random.

Notice that the left image contains clusters of dots together. If we are to imagine that a dot represents a shiny encounter, if the system being used is effectively truly random (i.e. provably psuedorandom by definition), we would expect clusters of shiny encounters close together, and long runs in between shinies, which is what you're describing. If you encountered a shiny exactly every 30,000 encounters, this would not be random at all, in fact it would be extremely ordered.

 

In practice it is effectively impossible for a computer system (which is deterministic by nature) to be truly random, and there is some debate as to whether "true" randomness even exists in the universe.

For most applications however, true randomness is unnecessary. It is usually sufficient, as it is in this case, that an attacker cannot analyse the output of a pseudorandom system and determine the input with any accuracy better than a guess. This is the case for the randomness in use in PokeMMO as evidenced by the link provided by Seth above (thanks Seth, I remembered Desu mentioning this but couldn't find it 🙂 ).

 

I'm sorry that you did not encounter a shiny in the amount of time that you expected, and that another player was very lucky and found many in the same day, but this does not demonstrate a "broken" system. As I mentioned, this is exactly what one would expect from a random system, and "pseudorandomness" is not any kind of knock against PokeMMO or its implementation of random monster generation.

 

Commenting here, since the OP also PM'd me complaining about this topic:

 

To expand on this reply, "Pseudo-random" doesn't actually imply anything about the quality of the random numbers generated. Instead, it defines how the randomness pool used by an algorithm came to be (pseudo-random entropy sources), the algorithm used, or could express an RNG which can be replayed with the same seed (pseudo-random number generator).

 

Pseudo-random entropy means that the randomness of a number generator is achieved through software means (i.e. by using the computer's own entropy sources) instead of through a hardware card which reads something which is believed to be truly random (like the background radiation of the universe or electrical noise). Hardware like this is only really necessary when dealing with problems like regulated gaming at casinos, high security applications, or applications where you need a lot of random numbers really fast (like internet certificate authorities).

 

CSPRNG is a class of random number generation which is widely regarded as "secure enough for everything important in your life." It's designed by people much smarter than anyone who makes this game and is what we use for the game's economically-relevant RNG (i.e. your shiny rolls, personality values, IVs, etc.). We figure that if it's good enough to secure your financial accounts, it's good enough to make your shiny rates fair.

 

For implementation-specific concerns, dive into how Linux generates random numbers.