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Old 09-25-2005, 01:23 PM
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Default Re: \"non-random\" raffle on Empire..what are the odds

Haha I was waiting for this.

10 winners, Aceberber through to CaesarDoggy. Assuming equal distribution of names on the alphabet (A-Z), that's roughly 2.1/26 of the alphabet (all As, all Bs, beginning of Cs). To odds of getting that ten times consecutively should be:

(2.1/26)^10

= (1.18 * 10)^-11

or roughly 1 in 100 billion.

BruceZ probably has some nCr crap though [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

edit: I had a look at your analysis and it should be more accurate since you took the sample of actual names on the site. Either way it's a HUGE number. No question their randomization algorithm was [censored] up. I can think of a couple of ways code could be written that would produce a sample like this. One possibility is that the random integer the system returned each time was limited to 32,000 (if it was a code default, or they used the wrong integer type, or some guy missed a 0 in the multiplier [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]), which would sample about 13% of 250,000 players names stored alphabetically. Seems about right?
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