Win Craps Bug Discovered

[six shooter]

Tonight, Lou and I were conducting our weekly Skype session for our members. I was demonstrating the charting visually, Lou would announce his bets prior to the number being called and Ricky was calling numbers from win craps. A member then said after about 15 numbers "this looks familiar". He pulled out a sheet from the other day and each number matched, we continued to about 30 numbers as each number matched exactly. Ricky then turned off win craps and we started charting again, sure enough it picked up where we left off. It is obvious that win craps is pre programmed and not a true Random Number Generator (RNG). Truly disappointing in this finding. One other option is a possibility he could have a setting he was not aware, however, he has been using win craps for years. I will contact someone from WC and look for an explanation and keep you posted.

[heavy]

There are multiple books of rolls in WinCraps. If you have the full version that lets you switch roll files you'll see them in there. I don't want to speak for Steen, here, but I'm of the opinion that the rolls were originally generated randomly, then the files loaded into in the program. You can also roll your own (on your kitchen table if you like) rolls, record them and upload them directly into WinCraps. Roadrunner had over 85,000 of his own in-casino rolls recorded on notebooks that he uploaded to WinCraps at least 12 years ago that he used to test strategies with. I'm thinking you are right with your assumption as far as it goes. You just were not aware of the rest of the story - as Paul Harvey used to say.

[Steen]

Tonight, Lou and I were conducting our weekly Skype session for our members. I was demonstrating the charting visually, Lou would announce his bets prior to the number being called and Ricky was calling numbers from win craps. A member then said after about 15 numbers "this looks familiar". He pulled out a sheet from the other day and each number matched, we continued to about 30 numbers as each number matched exactly. Ricky then turned off win craps and we started charting again, sure enough it picked up where we left off. It is obvious that win craps is pre programmed and not a true Random Number Generator (RNG). Truly disappointing in this finding. One other option is a possibility he could have a setting he was not aware, however, he has been using win craps for years. I will contact someone from WC and look for an explanation and keep you posted.

You've touched on a complicated subject.

Unfortunately, most of us don't have true random number generators (TRNG) on our personal computers. Instead we have programs (like WinCraps) that use pseudo-random number generators (PRNG) which are mathematical algorithms that produce simulated random numbers. Pseudo-random number generation has improved substantially over the years but there are still none that have yet reached perfection. However, there are many that are good enough to run statistically meaningful simulations. Even the casino industry has seen fit to use PRNGs in some of their machines. I've tried to select PRNGs that are known to be good, but I've included multiple generators so that users have options in the event they encounter questionable output.

The rolls are not pre-programmed in the way that you seem to be implying but they are deterministic so you could say that they're pre-programmed in a sense. Each PRNG begins a sequence of numbers by entering an initializing "seed" value. If you know the initial seed value and can re-enter it, then the PRNG will reproduce the same number sequence every time (and this can be very useful for analyzing data). The thing is, there are billions of possible initializing seed values, so if you don't know the initial seed value, you'd be hard pressed to predict the number sequence.

In WinCraps, the PRNGs are all seeded using your system's date/time when you start the program. However, you can chose your own seed value if you like (from the Misc tab on the Configuration screen) and you can choose whether to re-seed new sessions. If you've selected to re-seed new sessions and you've selected to enter a user supplied seed, then each time you start a new session, a pop-up will appear asking you to enter a seed value. The previously entered seed value will already be entered, so if you don't change it, you'll be reproducing the same sequence every time. If you've selected normal seeding which uses your system's date/time and if there are problems with your internal clock, then this could also cause the same numbers to be reproduced every time. So, I'd need to know more about which settings you've selected before I can say much more about this.

For folks who won't accept anything other than real dice, you have the option of rolling your own dice and inputting the numbers into the game using the "Roll your own numbers" pad. You can even turn on the dice roll recorder and save your rolls for replay or you can use dice roll files created by other people. There are also other sources of real random data that you can use. For instance, there are sites on the internet which output random numbers from a variety of sources which can be used for game rolls. I mention two of these in the FAQ on my web site: http://www.cloudcitysoftware.com/wcfaq.htm (see questions #17 and #29). One of the sources is radioactive decay and the other is random atmospheric noise. I've also made available a number of roll files which were created from these real random sources.

Steen