Impractical Random Number Generators | Useless Game Dev

Computers are bad random number generation. I want to help. Let's build a few way to extract entropy from the environment and start generating some numbers. Will it be a Tamagotchi colony? A Twitter spam bot? A dice shuffling robot? Or all of the above?
Shamelessly yonk-and-twist'd from suckerpinch's brilliant "Harder Drives" video • Harder Drive: Hard dri...
Watch me struggle to cook every recipe from Stardew Valley in real life here • Recreating EVERY recip...
More reading/watching on this subject:
- Source code for Doom's RNG github.com/id-Software/DOOM/b...
- xkcd's Tamagotchi Hive xkcd.com/1546/
- More xkcd on RNG xkcd.com/221/
- Hardware RNG en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwar...
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:52 Tamagotchi
05:19 Twitter spam bot
06:13 Dice Shuffling machine thing
09:05 Outro
Music:
"Wholesome" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
"Wallpaper" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
A002 by Monroeville Music Center
Support the channel on Patreon to get extra content, and access to the source code of all projects!
/ uselessgamedev
Follow me on Twitter, not that I tweet that often: / uselessgamedev
Kappa Avatar art by Boskoop / ed.boskoop
And as always, have a good one!
#Unity #GameDev #IndieDev #devlog #tamagotchi

[@GreenMonkeySam]

Tamagotchi: "What's my purpose?" UGD: "You generate pseudo-random numbers" Tamagotchi: "Oh my god"

[@dorkyface]

One of my favorite cyber security things I watched a video on ages ago had a camera pointed at a wall of lava lamps. Convert the pixels of the current image to a string of numbers and bam- non deterministic random numbers :D

[@dinhero21]

I belive cloudflare does that

[@redo1122]

yep, they use that for certificates

[@alexanderrosulek159]

I feel like now a days with physics ai someone could actually figure it out, definitely would need the lamp tho cuz they vary slightly and that ends up in in big changes

[@redo1122]

@@alexanderrosulek159 you cannot predict perfect frames, simply because of the amount of factors that go into a single picture made by a camera. you could maybe estimate the flow of the lava lamps, but the individual pixels could never be the same.

[@alexanderrosulek159]

@@redo1122 ahh your right I see but if it was a true real lava physics simulator surely they could just use that pixeled data with an offet in a function till it finds one which flows the same as well, all hypothetical of course it would be very very hard and computational intensive running a real true physics for each instance in the offset data to find the true flow from the initial state

[@mikoajstruzykowski9399]

My favourite way of getting random number in C is accesing memory that I didn't allocate, casting that to int value and useing modulo range+1

[@onetoomany671]

Thanks, I hate it.

[@icoudntfindaname]

Random number generator with a chance of segfault

[@PaulFisher]

it’s ingenious how you used Cute Cat Creature Pals to generate a Useless Source of Statistical Randomness

[@uselessgamedev]

Nice

[@Wolforce]

No antenna to catch cosmic background radiation?

[@uselessgamedev]

Brownian noise detector would have been pretty sick

[@VJK102]

An analog radio/tv antenna getting static and a dac would ve an interesting one indeed

[@mkks4559]

5:20 If the video gets removed for some reason, we'll know that's actually what they do to generate random numbers.

[@forbiddengod1]

Ok, usually the videos here do not deserve the channel name, with being actually pretty useful in understanding how things work and all. But this one perfectly fits the channel name :) Do not get me wrong, it is super fun, just different from what I expected.

[@NoseborN]

That's a nice idea for a project, coming with the most impractical random number generator.

[@PopeGoliath]

Reserve a bit in memory. Set it to zero. Continuously read from this bit, counting clock cycles. Wait until a gamma ray flips the bit. Use the parity of the recorded wait time to generate a random 1 or a 0. Repeat until your have enough random bits to create the int or float you need.

[@TobiasSample]

There’s a video by sucker pinch that explains how to make utterly terrible, amazing storage drives lol kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJSthIpth9Wln9Esi=zGMoCvzZhwNWKtC0

[@Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters]

Build a neutrino detector and use the time and coordinates of each detection.

[@InfiniteCoder01]

Did we just get a 3d printing and engineering content on this channel?

[@uselessgamedev]

Anything can happen as long as it's unexpected. I'm the Cerveza Cristal of game dev

[@sky01james28]

Who here remembers Trouble? It’s a board game similar to Sorry with a popping dice contraption in the middle

[@nati0598]

I think that both the die bot and twitter bot can be improved by performing their action before the game asks for the state. Of course, that would make the result visible before it is used, but the strangers on the internet will definitely help you hide it when you need it most.

[@His-Games]

This is too good. The enslavement was my favourite part, closely followed by unexpectedly becoming an engineering video

[@sempersolus5511]

This is the first _actually_ useless game dev video I've seen on this channel. I still learned plenty tho

[@jivejunior8753]

You can make these practical by having the "impractical" number generators maintain a queue of, say, 6 random numbers. Then you don't have to wait for them! That was the only impractical feature of these generators, right?

[@0hellow797]

When working on microcontroller arduino projects, generally a pin that isn’t grounded can give good random number entropy,

[@someidiot6359]

Immediately one of my favorite videos on this channel

[@akshatmishra5527]

Lets use lava lamps

[@richbuilds_com]

This was a lot of fun to watch. Good stuff!

[@Troyseph]

Can you do a video on the quality of the random numbers generated by the tamagochis?

[@uselessgamedev]

Someone suggested this in the discord but tbh I wouldn't know how to evaluate that (and I'm not too keen on spending time learning this haha)

[@Troyseph]

@@uselessgamedev I believe as a rough gauge you can use the numbers generated to create an image, and you can visually see the "quality" in the patterns that appear (when there shouldn't be any)

[@a52productions]

A simple but important test is to check whether the results mod N are evenly distributed for various N (ie, there are about as many evens as odd, about as many numbers that are 1 mod 3 as 2 or 0 mod 3, etc.) This isnt an exhaustive test by any means, but it's a good starting point as the bare minimum. A lot of applications depend on having numbers evenly distributed mod some other number. For further tests, there's the Diehard and BigCrush suites. These are preimplemented suites of tests to evaluate PRNGs based on the statistical processes of random sequences. You could just run those suites, or pick out some of the easier tests to run yourself.

[@AntonCastro44]

"Cute Cat Creature Pals, or CCCP for short", I see what you did there...

[@PeachCrusher69]

??

[@behnamsaeedi]

Love the video, I do recommend increasing the output volume. difficult to hear the audio.

[@uselessgamedev]

Thanks I'll keep that in mind!

[@neorack]

Hehehe I recognize that music. I wonder if you played Akaburs work. heheheh ^^

[@rikarddotzler8424]

Do more videos of more random number ideas!!

[@PaigeVG1995]

Hey, you just started showing up in my feed and I've found your videos very interesting and useful. It's good stuff! 👍Which, is why your name rubs me the wrong way... Useless game dev? 🤔 I don't think what we're doing here is useless, why do you?

[@Polychronius]

Well, someone has to drop the Von Neumann quote... 🙃"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."

[@ArthurWolf]

Imagine being so impatient you post your April's fools video 10 days in before April 1st....

[@NirielWinx]

Wow. The Doom RNG is pretty much XKCD 221. Also, a few years ago, my gf and I cooked a bunch of dishes from Skyrim for a week. That was fun.

[@uselessgamedev]

Yeah, guaranteed random

[@NirielWinx]

​@@uselessgamedev> But on a serious note, it's not stupid. True randomness doesn't feel random to people. Look at the number of people who get infuriated when their XCom soldier misses three times in a row, while the enemy gets three critical hits. So, a way to alleviate that is to use a bag. Put all your numbers in it, and pull one at a time, don't put them back in the bag. When it's empty, refill it. You end up with a much more homogeneous distribution with fewer clusters. If you pull a lot of bad numbers, the bag will have only good numbers in it so you are guaranteed to draw good numbers now. It's not true randomness, but it feels more random/fair to silly humans who don't understand stats. Or you can go the Final Fantasy way, and just lie. People think 80% chance of hitting means "pretty much always", so the game writes 80% on the UI, but internally it's like 95%. But because some games use the bag method, or just lie, when players encounter an honest game, they complain about the RNG. Anyway, look at that old Tom Scott video entitled "The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure". It's a very cute implementation and quite similar to your tamagochis.

[@kio2811]

Feels like when you type a random Minecraft seed

[@TankorSmash]

I appreciate you blurring out your username in the terminal but leaving it visible in the window title

[@uselessgamedev]

Ah rookie mistake

[@TankorSmash]

I think we've all been there!@@uselessgamedev

[@ScriptCoded]

​@@TankorSmash I for one have not had any reason to have that issue 😅

[@TankorSmash]

Screencasting is a risky sport!@@ScriptCoded

[@ariorick]

- Show me your idea - Well look, you move on arrows and jump on... - Sorry I meant Id

[@ariorick]

Sorry I'm high so no judgment

[@aidanmason3493]

nice

[@RasmusKristofferPedersen]

The dice'o'matic used by gamesbyemail might interest you: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bZ-bfYGufMeNmNU Huge machine rolling loads of dice, in order to have real dice-results for use in online boardgames!

[@mr.fraiche8635]

Idk why you didn’t just use a funnel and escalator like system

[@uselessgamedev]

Yes that was one of the "easy" methods (could also have mounted the whole box on a motor and rotated that) but I tried to go for "spectacle". Should probably have stuck with something that was guaranteed to work

[@mr.fraiche8635]

@@uselessgamedev a very entertaining “spectacle”, I love your videos and hope you keep doing interesting things like this

[@LeonardoTx1000]

Volume is very low :(

[@redo1122]

your video is kinda similar to a video called harder drives. At least the idea is

[@uselessgamedev]

Definitely! As stated in the description

[@heavygaming6596]

algorithm

[@cool.guy.]

it's X now :)

[@JanTuts]

1:26 OUR virtual pet