I thought that that was addressed within this last update

Flip a coin a hundred times and see how long the streaks of heads and tails are. You'll be surprised. It is just the nature of randomness.

Let me rephrase the question. I understand that the new release means country selection is no longer as random as it was. Instead, the chance of getting a country is weighted so that you are more likely to get a country that you haven't played recently. My question: is the weighting based on completed games, or on games that are now active. If the former, than the engine will keep trying to push you to countries that you haven't finished a game with recently, even if you are now playing that country.

I can't answer whether it's based on completed games or not, but I can say that I wouldn't be concerned about getting the same country twice in a row - you've got a 1 in 7 chance of that happening in a purely random environment anyway.

Yes, I accept that. And I also accept that in a purely random environment, I now have another 1 in 7 chance of getting England next time I join a game. What I am asking, is whether in fact the odds are more like 3 in 7 (if the engine only looks at finished games),or if it is more like 1 in 20 (if it includes active games).

I just love playing england!

The chance of you being a certain country depends on what countries you have been in the past. However the algorithm is very quick to "forget" what countries you have been, the near past is weighted much more heavily than the distant past.

Also the algorithm still has a large element of randomness to it. It makes the long streaks of countries that used to happen far more unlikely, but doesn't make getting the same country twice in a row impossible at all


The idea is when you get allocated a certain country the chance of you being that country next time is halved. It's not quite that simple because the algorithm has to decide who to roll the dice for first (it's the most unbalanced player, based on a standard statistical measure), but that about sums it up

Hussar, these are your chances: 0.061 0.061 0.242 0.122 0.242 0.031 0.242 (EFIGART), so the chances of you being England (or France) next time are relatively slim (~6%), but you're even less likely to be Russia (~%3)

Thanks Kestas. So just to be sure I understand, what the algorithm remembers, is what countries you were assigned to most recently, correct? That is the answer I was hoping for. (The answer I was hoping against was that it only knew what countries you had been in recently completed games) . Also, does this mean that CD pick ups are not included in the calculation?

The algorithm remembers all countries you've been assigned to, but the way it works means only the more recent choices have a big impact. It is about making sure you don't get an annoying run of the same country, not about making sure that at any given time you will always have played each country 1/7th of the time

CDs aren't included, since you choose which CD to take

Excellent.

I'm still not sure about how this randomizer/balancer algorithm works. I understand that it is intended to cumulatively halve the chance of being a certain country if you have been that country recently, but I would think that the fact that all seven countries must be assigned in every game would interfere with these probabilities. Could someone give a full account of how the algorithm functions?

From what Kestas said above, each person has their own set of chances. When the program is assigning countries for a game it starts with the person whose country odds are the most out of balance and rolls for them first, and so on down to the last person who gets whatever is left, but also was the least unbalanced regarding recent countries.

Here is the code, it's about the only way to spell it out exactly because the algorithm itself is a bit involved: http://pastebin.com/m17 6b20

But Alderian pretty much summed it up

looks like the points icon detector needs tweaking: http://pastebin.com/m17d6b20d

Maybe it's too much work, but … if the points icon system left out the space between the number and the icon (unless the space was in the original) and also set the "alt" text to match the case of the original, then one could still copy and paste something even if an inappropriate points icon slips in. (As it is, I get two extra spaces and letters in the wrong case.)