[47968] in Cypherpunks
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Thu Jan 25 03:18:54 1996
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 08:25:10 +0100
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)
fair@clock.org ("Erik E. Fair" (Time Keeper)) writes:
>does anyone know what sorts of random number generators those
>electronic games use, and how (if at all) they are measured and regulated
>by the Nevada Gaming Commission? They might have something to teach us.
There was some conversation about this recently on rec.gambling.other-games.
Several people who work in the industry said that electronic machines
use some sort of PRNG, but with a nice added bit of random input - the
player's timing of hitting the buttons. One poster described it as the
machine constantly generating numbers, and choosing the payoff based
on the last number generated when the user hit a button.
I think that'd work pretty well. It's nice that this is in a slot
machine: typical computers can't afford to waste lots of time
throwing away random numbers.
There was also some speculation about whether the machines were immune
to electronic tampering.
