Can An Online Roulette Wheel Be Fair ?
Sunday, May 15th, 2011It sounds quite simple but one of the hardest things to do for a computer is to produce a random number. It’s important to remember this as many computer programs need to be just that. Take any kind of electronic online game for instance like roulette, fruit machines and they all need a random number generator simply to make them fair. It should be of concern to anyone who everybody who wants to play online roulette especially if they do it regularly.
Unfortunately it really is tough for a computer to be random, simply because they have to be told how to do it. The computer processes the instructions, which are written by a programmer who determines how it should act. Just imagine how hard it is to produce instructions on how to be unpredictable, that is the dilemma. Actually it is pretty much impossible to be completely random all they can manage is to be Pseduo random. It’s actually difficult to spot the problem though – go and have a look at the spins produced at a free online roulette and see if you can see a pattern, I’ll bet you can’t.
There is another difficulty in that we are also hopeless at being random. We tend to want 50/50 chances to happen 50% of the time which is actually not going to happen that often surprisingly enough. Real random sequences can actually look very strange, with long, improbable sequences commonplace. It will not be surprising to players of martingale who have watched their system destroyed by unnatural sequences. Our neat, balance perception of what ‘random’ should look like usually ends up in the code of the computer programs.
When you’re playing some game online the problem is worst as the perception of the player is important. If we get an unlucky spin of a wheel or reel on an online game we get suspicious of the computer. If the same thing happened on a real roulette wheel, we’d just mark it down to bad luck. It’s especially dangerous if you’re running any sort of roulette systems which relies on a completely random gain.
For me this perception that everything is a series of code spoils the fun too much. I can’t enjoy computerised gambling as it doesn’t feel like lady luck is given a free reign. It probably explains why there are so many live video games online now, which stream physical games to your desktop.



