#ulog (112) The Low-end Ulogging Life -- Oct. 12, 2018

doughtaker (56)in #ulog • 6 years ago

On Friday I stayed at home and spent a large portion of my day tackling two interesting math problems, although these were not math problems in the traditional sense.

One problem was posed to me by @lordnigel, involving an "expansion" that he wanted to make to the Interactive Battle Tournament (IBT) series on Steemit. After taking a look at his idea, I decided to work on putting together a math model that would try to simulate an XP (experience point) progression system that one might see in a tabletop or video game RPG. In doing so, there were three things that I needed to be conscious of:

The system had to be simple/understandable enough that @lordnigel wouldn't have too difficult of a time converting it into computer code to be utilized by a gameplay bot.
The system had to be simple enough for prospective players to understand the rules of progression.
Hopefully, whatever I crafted would be properly "balanced" and have an inherent "flow" that would encourage players to continue playing this "expansion".

As for what I ended up putting together, you all will have to wait and see. When the time is right, @lordnigel will reveal whatever information he believes to be appropriate to release to the general public.

The second problem was a casino #math problem that came to me while I was browsing through videos of new slot machines being shown at this year's G2E convention, which took place this week. One particular machine grabbed my attention as one of its developers was discussing the game's mechanics and also mentioned certain probabilities associated with this new game. The information provided was of the form "These are the odds of event A occurring, and those are the odds of event B occurring."

Right away, I asked myself, "Is there a way that I can derive the manufacturer's numbers based on the information provided in the video?" Doing so would be no easy task, as I had already done a similar thing several years ago based on a PAR sheet that I found online for a slot machine that at the time, was actually out on casino floors. With the G2E video, I would have a lot less data and information to work with to try and figure out this new game.

It took several hours, but I got the information I wanted. A couple of things threw me off for a while: first, the numbers mentioned in the video were actually rounded to the nearest whole number instead of being the true numbers. Second, I worked out that between the two statements made involving the specific events and the chances of triggering them, there were 122 branches [or possible paths/combinations] related to the events to analyze, and I needed to figure out the probability of each of these individual branches occurring, and make sure that the sum of all those probabilities added up to 1.

Eventually I found the right numbers that would confirm what was said in the video. More importantly, I could expand a bit on those numbers and produce my own data that would be more relevant to the gambler looking for an edge. So now that I have that information, all I need to do is find out what casinos in town are going to be getting this particular machine.

Two big math problems, two completely different focuses, and hopefully two satisfying solutions found for my Friday. Phew!

#ulogs #random #ibt #gaming