Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
gamers who play games with a lot of RNG pretty consistently talk as if luck is a conserved quantity (i can't tell how jokingly) - like you can "use up" luck in one segment of a game and that'll doom you for the next segment
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
i guess this is "just" gambler's fallacy but ime nobody seems to talk about it in the other direction - like i hear "i used up my luck on that, i'm screwed now" way more often than "i've been so unlucky recently, i'm due for some good luck now"
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
i could dismiss this as people not understanding how probability works with independent events except the funny thing is they *aren't* independent! game RNG is always pseudorandom. depending on the game it can deviate from random enough to be easily manipulable
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the way a lot of game RNG works is that a list of numbers is generated based on some seeds (which are often under player control, e.g. step count) and "random" events go down the list when they need the next "random" number to decide what to do. so it's all deterministic
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
idk if this is enough to even partially rehabilitate the seemingly pretty strong intuition that luck is conserved but it's something. PRNGs aren't "actually random," they're just complicated enough that there aren't any blatantly obvious patterns
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
idk where i'm going w this, we could transition to a discussion of what "actually random" could possibly mean and whether anything could possibly be "actually random" other than literal quantum stuff. there's something i want to respect about "naive" intuitions about luck here
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