Olympia: random numbers and seeing things From: gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1992 04:45:29 +0000 Actually, there is a clever way to have a random chance of seeing an item while not making it advantageous to do many LOOKs in the same turn. I'm sure someone has come up with this before; I've seen a similar system used at Princeton's SGU. What you do is generate a random number between 0 and 1 for each item that can be seen, and for each person that will be looking. These numbers are stored for 1 turn. When you want to look at an item, you add together the numbers for the looker and the item, modulo 1, and if that result is less than whatever %, you see the item. If the same person looks at the same item twice, you get the same result. But if the same person looks at 2 different items, the results are not related. Also, the distribution of the result is still flat. Up