MAngband

This is me trying to create a down stair. It took 11 attempts to create one, with the first 10 attempts creating up stairs.

Is it possible to just make this spell create a 50/50 chance stair more evenly?

Hahaha  ;D

I am pretty sure thats just a case of the evil RNG.  The RNG reads your mind, knows what you want, and gives you the opposite.

Wanna detail a better method of generating truly random numbers?

I guess it could probably be done by checking for even/odd turns of the game or something, though.

Your conclusion is based on an incredibly small subset - sometimes things like that do happen in even truly random systems. If you test on a much larger scale you'll notice the percentage tends towards 50% the bigger you go. There may have been a bias at the time due to something else requesting random numbers but there is no predetermined bias for Create Stairs. We'd have to do a lot of crazy stuff to make random numbers separate for each function in the game.

narchan is right, the game reads your mind. usually when i want to get stuff, like  bolts, they are never there.

Never failed a 1% fail spell 10 times in a row? Happened to me once...

Actually, this whole scenario was one that Apple ran into with their iPod random play feature. What they found, and effectively what I'm complaining about above, is that true randomness often doesnt match with human-percieved randomness.

You can completely validly end up casting stairs that are all of one type ten of fifteen times in a row, and have it still be mathemetically random. But the experience of that randomness will feel non random.

What Apple did over time was tweak their randomness to match more closely what humans expect randomness to be vs. true mathematical randomness. IE, if a song by band X was just chosen, then dont select another song by that band for a little while. This way, the random (but experientially non-random) situation of 4 songs by the same band being played is avoided. It makes it all less mathematically random, but more experientially "random".

So, we could consider something like that here perhaps (and for other things like it). If we are randomly choosing between A or B (50 percent chance of either), and, say, A is chosen, then we could make the next attempt be 40-60 for A/B, and after than 30/70 for A/B etc.

Course, this then means each of these would have to be tracked for each player and each type of thing that we want to subject to this method, which is a whole new feature and series of info to track and manage, so, as usual, easier said than done

There is confusion here that suspects a RNG remembers the last result.  it does not.  a 50/50 chance means you could potentially fail 3000 times in a row to get the desired result.

This is also the most common and major failure gambling, as it turns out.  "oh baby, Red 22 is *due*!"

That's an expectation I don't "have" so to speak (and why I brought up the I-Pod shuffle example). Its the ol "human idea of random" vs "actual honest to god random" heh. That is, I *know* its random, and acceptable, randomly, to have a dozen stairs-up created. But, being human, I inevitably think "but damnit, thats just 'random' random!"