Impractical Random Number Generators | Useless Game Dev

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  • Опубліковано 3 лют 2025

КОМЕНТАРІ • 72

  • @GreenMonkeySam
    @GreenMonkeySam 10 місяців тому +34

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

  • @dorkyface
    @dorkyface 10 місяців тому +62

    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
      @dinhero21 10 місяців тому +16

      I belive cloudflare does that

    • @redo1122
      @redo1122 10 місяців тому +8

      yep, they use that for certificates

    • @alexanderrosulek159
      @alexanderrosulek159 10 місяців тому +1

      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
      @redo1122 10 місяців тому +6

      @@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
      @alexanderrosulek159 10 місяців тому

      @@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

  • @forbiddengod1
    @forbiddengod1 10 місяців тому +11

    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.

  • @PaulFisher
    @PaulFisher 10 місяців тому +11

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

  • @NoseborN
    @NoseborN 10 місяців тому +32

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

    • @PopeGoliath
      @PopeGoliath 10 місяців тому +5

      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
      @TobiasSample 10 місяців тому

      There’s a video by sucker pinch that explains how to make utterly terrible, amazing storage drives lol
      ua-cam.com/video/JcJSW7Rprio/v-deo.htmlsi=zGMoCvzZhwNWKtC0

    • @Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters
      @Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters 10 місяців тому +1

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

  • @MrAnxieties
    @MrAnxieties 10 місяців тому +14

    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
      @onetoomany671 10 місяців тому +4

      Thanks, I hate it.

    • @icoudntfindaname
      @icoudntfindaname 8 місяців тому

      Random number generator with a chance of segfault

  • @His-Games
    @His-Games 10 місяців тому

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

  • @Wolforce
    @Wolforce 10 місяців тому +35

    No antenna to catch cosmic background radiation?

    • @uselessgamedev
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому +19

      Brownian noise detector would have been pretty sick

    • @VJK102
      @VJK102 10 місяців тому +3

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

  • @mkks4559
    @mkks4559 10 місяців тому +12

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

  • @nati0598
    @nati0598 10 місяців тому +4

    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.

  • @sempersolus5511
    @sempersolus5511 10 місяців тому +3

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

  • @sky01james28
    @sky01james28 10 місяців тому +2

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

  • @InfiniteCoder01
    @InfiniteCoder01 10 місяців тому +23

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

    • @uselessgamedev
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому +16

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

  • @someidiot6359
    @someidiot6359 10 місяців тому

    Immediately one of my favorite videos on this channel

  • @FriedMonkey362
    @FriedMonkey362 5 місяців тому +1

    I love this video, i have watched it like 3 times

  • @jivejunior8753
    @jivejunior8753 10 місяців тому +3

    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?

  • @richbuilds_com
    @richbuilds_com 10 місяців тому

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

  • @AntonCastro44
    @AntonCastro44 10 місяців тому +1

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

  • @0hellow797
    @0hellow797 10 місяців тому

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

  • @Troyseph
    @Troyseph 10 місяців тому +2

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

    • @uselessgamedev
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому +2

      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
      @Troyseph 10 місяців тому

      @@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
      @a52productions 8 місяців тому

      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.

  • @neorack
    @neorack 10 місяців тому

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

  • @behnamsaeedi
    @behnamsaeedi 10 місяців тому

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

  • @LynnWinx
    @LynnWinx 10 місяців тому

    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
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому

      Yeah, guaranteed random

    • @LynnWinx
      @LynnWinx 10 місяців тому

      ​@@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.

  • @rikarddotzler8424
    @rikarddotzler8424 10 місяців тому

    Do more videos of more random number ideas!!

  • @kio2811
    @kio2811 10 місяців тому

    Feels like when you type a random Minecraft seed

  • @PaigeVG1995
    @PaigeVG1995 9 місяців тому

    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?

  • @ArthurWolf
    @ArthurWolf 10 місяців тому

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

  • @akshatmishra5527
    @akshatmishra5527 10 місяців тому +1

    Lets use lava lamps

  • @Polychronius
    @Polychronius 10 місяців тому

    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."

  • @ariorick
    @ariorick 10 місяців тому +1

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

    • @ariorick
      @ariorick 10 місяців тому +1

      Sorry I'm high so no judgment

  • @TankorSmash
    @TankorSmash 10 місяців тому +2

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

    • @uselessgamedev
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому +1

      Ah rookie mistake

    • @TankorSmash
      @TankorSmash 10 місяців тому

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

    • @ScriptCoded
      @ScriptCoded 10 місяців тому

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

    • @TankorSmash
      @TankorSmash 10 місяців тому

      Screencasting is a risky sport!@@ScriptCoded

  • @LeonardoTx1000
    @LeonardoTx1000 10 місяців тому

    Volume is very low :(

  • @mr.fraiche8635
    @mr.fraiche8635 10 місяців тому

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

    • @uselessgamedev
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому +1

      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
      @mr.fraiche8635 10 місяців тому

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

  • @aidanmason3493
    @aidanmason3493 10 місяців тому

    nice

  • @RasmusKristofferPedersen
    @RasmusKristofferPedersen 10 місяців тому

    The dice'o'matic used by gamesbyemail might interest you: ua-cam.com/video/7n8LNxGbZbs/v-deo.html
    Huge machine rolling loads of dice, in order to have real dice-results for use in online boardgames!

  • @heavygaming6596
    @heavygaming6596 10 місяців тому

    algorithm

  • @redo1122
    @redo1122 10 місяців тому +1

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

    • @uselessgamedev
      @uselessgamedev  10 місяців тому

      Definitely! As stated in the description

  • @cool.guy.
    @cool.guy. 10 місяців тому

    it's X now :)

  • @JanTuts
    @JanTuts 10 місяців тому +2

    1:26 OUR virtual pet