The questioner was pointing to other electronic games, such as bubble craps or Video Poker, however. Slots have weighted distributions to accomplish a certain payback percentage over time to deal with physical reels, for instance, as recently discussed on the article around reel mapping. If you think is the case, you should stop gambling.įirst of all, just because a human coded a PRNG, and there can be a weighted distribution, doesn’t mean a game is rigged. The second is that because PRNGs can be weighted to some outcomes over others, the games must be rigged. The first is that slots (and other electronic games) use what’s actually a pseudo-random number generator, or PRNG, because they’re built by humans to mathematically set up a random distribution, but since it’s done through a series of steps via code, it’s likely not truly random and, as has happened here or there, can sometimes be reverse engineered. ( RNG, for those not in the know, stands for Random Number Generator.)
This question, which I was asked to weigh in on recently on Twitter, blends two topics I’ve previously written about.