From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 7515 invoked by alias); 1 Oct 2004 18:37:09 -0000 Mailing-List: contact xconq7-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: xconq7-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 7486 invoked from network); 1 Oct 2004 18:37:06 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out3.apple.com) (17.254.13.22) by sourceware.org with SMTP; 1 Oct 2004 18:37:06 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (a17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out3.apple.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i91IexXe000223 for ; Fri, 1 Oct 2004 11:40:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from relay4.apple.com (relay4.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.3.14) with ESMTP id ; Fri, 1 Oct 2004 11:37:06 -0700 Received: from [17.219.205.4] ([17.219.205.4]) by relay4.apple.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i91Ib3lo005544; Fri, 1 Oct 2004 11:37:04 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <415DA3D5.4010507@apple.com> Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 18:47:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lincoln Peters CC: Xconq list Subject: Re: Map-related deja-vu References: <1096588332.4050.15389.camel@localhost> In-Reply-To: <1096588332.4050.15389.camel@localhost> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2004/txt/msg01315.txt.bz2 Lincoln Peters wrote: >I just had the weirdest thing happen when I was testing knightmare.g. >Although the module is set up to produce a new random map every time I >load it, the last time I ran it, it produced a map that, as far as I can >tell, is identical to a map it produced when I was testing a few days >ago, down to the layout of independent units! > >Since the world-size is set to 240x120 (circumference 1440), I would >think that the chance of getting the exact same map twice would be >astronomically low. Has anyone else experienced this kind of behavior? >Could it be a bug in Xconq? Is it more likely a bug in my computer's >random-number generator? Or should I consider it to be a sign and buy a >pair of lottery tickets? > It certainly could be a duplicate. I thought about the possibility when deciding how studly the randomization needed to be, but you would likely only see the exact dup if you started up hundreds of games with exactly the same size map, same number of players, same options, etc., and if the world wasn't seen, you couldn't be sure it was a dup until nearly the end of the game. If the world was seen and you really didn't want the dup, you'd just kill it off and start another game. Given the length of time a game takes, for a normal player it would likely be years before a dup appeared, assuming Xconq was not updated in the meantime. On the flip side, one of my concerns back then was computational efficiency, which seems rather quaint. One could seed from a bigger number and do 64-bit arithmetic, will likely be unnoticeable to performance. Stan