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Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
217
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Posted - 2012.07.03 08:12:00 -
[1] - Quote
Drake Dahma wrote:If blink is a scam, then this new chimera sitting on my hanger is a lie....but I'm looking right at it so it must be legit.
I think it is useful to think of blink not so much as a lottery than as a slot machine.
I think what spawns these suspicions is that many people intuitively understand that "true" randomness with a constant price/(probability of winning) is a bad way to keep players hooked.
If the player depletes his bankroll due to a losing streak after the first few games he will be dissatisfied and unhappy - remember that at the end of the day he pays for entertainment and that entertainment has to be provided to him.
In real-life regulations force slot machine designers to keep each roll independent from the previous ones (unless it is explicitly stated by the game otherwise) and they try to make up for this by giving some mid-sized pay-outs a relatively high probability (some excitement to keep the player interested but not enough to make him take his winnings and go home) and by allowing the player only to bet a small part of his bankroll on each roll (so he won't deplete it too fast).
In EVE no such regulations exist and it would be easy to deign a system where wins approach a uniform distribution over a long time but the randomness gets "massaged" a little in the short-term.
Why not give a new player a hidden bonus so he gets a favorable first impression of the site?
Is it really a great idea to allow unlimited losing streaks to any player?
Blink has two issues compared to RL slot machines (due to its lottery-style format):
- it allows players to lose a lot of money in a really short time (which is not fun).
- there is no way to keep the player happy with some small payouts, he either wins or loses without any middle ground and the size of win/loss is chosen by himself (achievements try to make up for this a little)
Blink has one massive advantage over conventional slot machines:
- there is no way for the house to go into the red even temporarily (the only possibly loss is due to opportunity cost when market prices change)
- players don't occupy one of a limited number of seats, keeping them around playing is cheap.
The first advantage makes playing with the probabilities riskless for the lottery provider.
I don't know what Somer Blink is doing - I only use them occasionally to cash out the 100m credit I get from buying a GTC through their site.
But if I were to design a gambling site like Blink I would try to massage probabilities to take some control over the pacing of each players play session to "optimize" his entertainment (and maybe cut off the extreme tails of his payout distribution over a typical play session).
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Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
217
|
Posted - 2012.07.03 10:46:00 -
[2] - Quote
malaire wrote:It's even better - just get control of random.org and you can predict 100% of winning tickets.
yep, that would be one way of doing it - but in practice it would rely on blink using a misconfigured nameserver which is pretty unlikely.
Alternatively you could block access to random.org via a ddos (or wait for a time when random.org is not available for some other reason) and try to exploit some weakness in mt_rand.
Any pseudo random number generator which does not fetch entropy from outside sources is periodic, that is the numbers will start repeating themselves after some time.
For the mersenne twister used by mt_rand the period is 2^19937 GêÆ 1 which is pretty long. And of course the sequence of random numbers is different for each of the 2^32 seed states.
If Blink was trying to create really long random numbers one still might be able to figure out at which position one is in which sequence after observing a couple of outputs. But with the small numbers of tickets this is hopeless.
Additionally consider that Blink does probably use multiple php processes to handle requests each of which maintains its own PRNG. I guess that the PRNG of whatever php process gets to handle the request for the final ticket gets to determine the winning number - so you can't even look at the sequence of winning numbers and treat them as a sequence of mt outputs - they are a wild mix of any number of MTs.
Your best bet would probably be to try get php to spawn a new process with your request (or maybe you are lucky and cogdev.net uses a CGI configuration but in real-life that doesn't happen) in which case a new PRNG would be initialized and you would "only" have to guess one of the 2^32 seed states.
Real slot machines keep cycling through random numbers even when there is no user input to prevent an attacker from being able to exploit the PRNG's sequential nature.
On Linux a call to /dev/random (which introduces entropy from hardware devices; but which is blocking and can be slow if not enough entropy is in the pool) or /dev/urandom (less true randomness but fast) would probably be preferable to mt_rand.
However, in practice I can't really see anyone being able to exploit this. |
Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
217
|
Posted - 2012.07.03 10:46:00 -
[3] - Quote
Akirei Scytale wrote:Ariel Armani wrote:Hello, I heard about this 250 celebration or whatever that Somer Blink is having, so I was interested. I have some extra ISK for "fun". Anyway, I was asking around, and somebody sent me this link - http://blinkexposed.blogspot.com/That got me worried, so I asked about it in the Blink thread. Some dude Andrew Nox (with Blink I guess) told me to just "ask other Blink players about their experiences". So that's what I am doing. Anybody want to share their experiences, good or bad? Thanks!  Playing Somer Blink long term is about as intelligent as playing Blackjack long term, for the exact same reasons.
in blackjack you can count cards, so what was your point again? |
Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
236
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Posted - 2012.07.10 07:40:00 -
[4] - Quote
Pariah Fenwick wrote:Soundwave Plays Diablo wrote:If hes spending 12 tickets at a time with a 30% win ratio there's something terribly ******* wrong. Funny that, because just now according to your boy he wasn't losing anything, just goes to show everyone's win ratio is 1:2, you either win or lose :) Every time he lost one of his 12 ticket blinks his win ratio would go down, multiply that over 18000 odd blinks, makes sense really. Oh and this really is my last post :) Have fun with your "smear" campaign o/
12 tickets out of 16 should result in a long-term win ratio of 75%.
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Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
237
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Posted - 2012.07.10 08:55:00 -
[5] - Quote
Tippia wrote:Vera Algaert wrote:12 tickets out of 16 should result in a long-term win ratio of 75%. The funny thing about randomness is that you can always use the argument GÇ£long-term hasn't happened yetGÇ¥. 
simple binomial test tells you how (un)likely that is |
Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
361
|
Posted - 2012.09.24 07:50:00 -
[6] - Quote
another bump for the Somer Blink advertisement thread.
"Somer Blink - I can't believe it's not a scam."
I'm a NPC corp alt, any argument I make is invalid. |
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