What are the odds?

[Fallen]

Can anyone tell me the odds of this happening as it did? I'm two parts curious, one part lazy.


[voodoo]>prepare 704
You begin drawing a faint, twisting symbol while softly intoning the words for Phase...
Your spell is ready.
>
[voodoo]>cast my vel
You gesture at a sheet of faded vellum.
[Spell Hindrance for some ancient elven battle armor is 11% with current Armor Use skill, d100= 7]
Your armor prevents the spell from working correctly.
Cast Roundtime 3 Seconds.
>704 my vel
[voodoo]>prepare 704
You begin drawing a faint, twisting symbol while softly intoning the words for Phase...
Your spell is ready.
>
[voodoo]>cast my vel
You gesture at a sheet of faded vellum.
[Spell Hindrance for some ancient elven battle armor is 11% with current Armor Use skill, d100= 4]
Your armor prevents the spell from working correctly.
Cast Roundtime 3 Seconds.
>704 my vel
[voodoo]>prepare 704
You begin drawing a faint, twisting symbol while softly intoning the words for Phase...
Your spell is ready.
>
[voodoo]>cast my vel
You gesture at a sheet of faded vellum.
[Spell Hindrance for some ancient elven battle armor is 11% with current Armor Use skill, d100= 10]
Your armor prevents the spell from working correctly.
Cast Roundtime 3 Seconds.
>laugh
You laugh out loud!
>704 my vel
[voodoo]>prepare 704
You begin drawing a faint, twisting symbol while softly intoning the words for Phase...
Your spell is ready.
>
[voodoo]>cast my vel
You gesture at a sheet of faded vellum.
[Spell Hindrance for some ancient elven battle armor is 11% with current Armor Use skill, d100= 7]
Your armor prevents the spell from working correctly.
Cast Roundtime 3 Seconds.
>704 my vel
[voodoo]>prepare 704
You begin drawing a faint, twisting symbol while softly intoning the words for Phase...
Your spell is ready.
>
[voodoo]>cast my vel
You gesture at a sheet of faded vellum.
[Spell Hindrance for some ancient elven battle armor is 11% with current Armor Use skill, d100= 1]
Your armor prevents the spell from working correctly.
Cast Roundtime 3 Seconds.

[WRoss]

0.11^5=0.00161051%

[BriarFox]

.00001611

[Fallen]

.00 or .0000?

[Latrinsorm]

.00% = .0000

[TheEschaton]

definitely the latter, 0.0000161051, or 0.00161051% chance.

[Fallen]

Thanks all. Figured it was fucking rare, just wanted to make sure how rare.

[Merala]

I seem to get "lucky" like that too sometimes, though never that bad. I once fumbled a cast 3 times on the same critter and with 8% hindrance failed a spell 4 times out of 5 (three unsucessful, one successful, then another unsuccessful).

[WRoss]

I have noticed some weird anomalies like this before. It seems odd that something that has a .05% chance happens with such frequency. Maybe I will write a lich script to monitor rolls and spell failures to track the consistency with true randomness.

[Kuyuk]

11%

[WRoss]

11%

It's 11% for the next cast to miss, but not for it to happen 5 times in a row. I can't tell if you are just being sarcastic or not (I love text tone inflection) so i'll explain.

Flipping a coin is a 50% chance for heads and 50% for tails. If you flip it twice, what is the likelihood that you will have two heads? The possible outcomes are heads-heads, tails-tails, heads-tails, tails-heads, so it's 25%.

50% * 50% = .5 * .5 = .25 = 25%

[Gelston]

It is a fresh 11% chance every time. I know what you mean by it happening in a row though.

[TheEschaton]

Of course it's a fresh 11% every time. But for you to miss 5 times in a row with an 11% to do so, is 0.11^5.

[ZeP]

Coin flips are one of the best topics if someone declares religion or politics off limits. I'll start. How shall we all agree upon how weight, shape, material, and quantum physics are considered?

[TheEschaton]

Maybe if it was an African coin.

[ZeP]

Thumb + index finger flip?

[Stanley Burrell]

Thumb + index finger flip?

Definitely, but I'm partial to using one, then two fingers, then flipping.

Now regarding the coin, qualitatively you're going to go with the alloy/homogenous mixture:

Remember, legend holds that cranberry glass was first created when a nobleman threw a gold coin into molten glass. Later, this proved to be impossible, which leaves us with no (what I see as) defined quantitative property unless you want to bring into account, as you're already familiar, the Iron Universe theory, which we then postulate the coin's(s/l/g) delta-infinity existence based on quantum pulsing.

I could be wrong. But I'm not (cue mandatory bickering/proving I'm "wrong" via Anti-coin team members *sigh*)

[Cephalopod]

Someone ask Warclaidhm.

[Latrinsorm]

I have noticed some weird anomalies like this before. It seems odd that something that has a .05% chance happens with such frequency. Maybe I will write a lich script to monitor rolls and spell failures to track the consistency with true randomness.It's more a psychological phenomenon than a statistical one. The set of "things I have noticed" is not identical with the set of "things that have happened", and skews heavily towards the extreme, the deviant, the remarkable; or put in technical parlance, the RojoDisco-y.

[richerdjohn]

It seems odd that something that has a .05% chance happens with such frequency.

[WRoss]

So two days ago, I got 6 x 6% failures in a row. Same day on my bard, I get 5 x 5%.

4.6656 x (10 ^ -8) and 3.125 x (10 ^ -7). What is the likelihood of this probability happening in the same day? That is rhetorical because there are way too many unknowns, but yeah, I'd be surprised to see it happen again.

[LMingrone]

It's pretty hard to tell. I don't know the source code or the random number generator code they use. I bet it has hiccups sometimes where you see spikes in high or low rolls. I doubt it would be player specific though. When you think of how many rolls that are probably going on at one time, I doubt there's any way to really figure out the odds. Like you said, there's too many unknown factors.

If there was a way to log and write a script that added all players rolls to a database over a long enough period of time, I'd bet you get a straight line that fit the true %s, and also see spikes when there is a hiccup. But without knowing how it's coded there's no way to tell if it's just anomalies or something else.

Edit: deleted how I would do it. Order was wrong. Will do it tomorrow.

[Mohrgan]

The next question: how many times have you tried to cast with 11% hindrance...I mean total, in the entire time you've been playing Gemstone. Thousands? Tens of thousands?

Given a large enough sample size, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Of course, I'm secretly paranoid that nothing is really random in Gemstone and they are are actually manipulating every "so-called" die roll that we've ever generated.

I posit that this is the real reason that Baelog was banned...because he knew too much.

[LMingrone]

K. So I wrote some garbage roller in Java. Haven't messed with Java in years, so I wanted to try something out. Basically, I had three random number generators that checked on each other, and one that didn't check on anything, and was just random (makes it possible to roll 100 or 1).

After it running for a short while, it gave an average of 11.19% for failed casts. Pretty close. I doubt this is anything like what is in the game, but it had times of spikes of really high, and really low rolls. Yet it kept the average close to 11%.

On an infinite timeline the chance of anything happening approaches 1. So, yeah, you keep it around your desired %, but anything can and will happen. Monkeys writing the works of Shakespeare and all that shit.

Edit: I hate Shakespeare, he stole my birthday. April 23rd is mine beech. Merchant of Venice is the only thing he wrote that I would "A++++++++++++ WOULD READ AGAIN".