

Five million people see a classic case of calling random()without reseeding - markdennehy
http://stochasticgeometry.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/why-seeding-is-important-for-random-functions/

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chipsy
This is partly the fault of Flash itself. It doesn't provide control over
seeding the API's PRNG.

A diligent coder can of course implement their own PRNG method, but that is
not an excuse for providing a half-broken feature.

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tesseract
The regular random number generator in Flash is automatically seeded and you
can't specify a seed. This article, though, talks about using
BitmapData.noise() which takes a seed as a parameter, and normally when I see
people discussing the use of that API for general purpose random number
generation it is precisely because it allows control over seeding.

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snorkel
Reminds me of this classic cautionary tale of poor PRNG seeding, How We
Learned to Cheat at Online Poker,
[http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.ph...](http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.php)

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known
In PHP 4.2.0 and later, there is no need to seed the random generator with
mt_srand(). This is done automatically.

<http://www.w3schools.com/php/func_math_mt_rand.asp>

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streety
Although factually correct I don't see the relevance given that this game is
Flash based and written in actionscript. Am I missing something?

Also, why not link directly to the php site? <http://php.net/mt_srand>

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hugothefrog
Funny, I was just watching a colleague play this at work the other day.

He'd written an app to play the game for him - takes a screen shot, scans the
bitmap, figures out the pieces, then determines an optimum set of moves.

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brunov
Just like Sweeperbot! <http://sweeperbot.org/>

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Keyframe
well I have tried to see if this is true and it seems like it isn't anymore.

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pbhjpbhj
I had the same board as in the article, but it seems to be fixed now.

