What is a Random Number Generator (RNG)?.

'Fame or Shame? Say, that sounds like a lark! Maybe I will give it a try! Excuse me, fellow automatons, I'll be right back.' I walk nonchalantly over, glancing at at NPC sitting nearby (of course she has just hit triple sevens) and give the reels a spin. I stand around in a cluster of NPCs for a bit, blending in, then pretend to notice an interesting looking slot machine for the first time. I buy a sensible 500 chips from the cashier-not the usual 50,000 some high-falutin' player character might. This morning I buy myself a standard NPC outfit, and drive back in a dull brown car, obeying all the traffic rules like an obedient AI. Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! I've been strolling around in a white suit, white shoes, a white scarf and a white top hat-decidedly un-NPC-like. Just those three measly grapes, once, in two hours.

I also never got three sevens or three melons or three bells. You need to get three golden microphones on the payline to spin it, and I never got those. Lost in this frustrating slot machine conspiracy is the fact that I never got the chance to spin the Fame or Shame wheel and win a shirt or a watch or whatever prize it dispatches. Oh, wait, the writer of that episode died in 1967. Is it a conspiracy? Are these NPCs paid by the casino to sit there and win to convince idiots (me) that these are the loosest (and only) slots in town? Are they all part of a collective of cheaters who cracked these machines' algorithms and know how to hit the jackpot 25% of the time and won't tell me how they do it? Did one of my many, many deaths in GTA Online deliver me to hell, like in that Twilight Zone episode, but instead of me always winning, everyone else is always winning? (Note to the writer of that episode: that would be a much more punishing version of hell. Over and over again I'd walk past a gambler or park my ass next to one of them and they'd come up all sevens. That was it! Three lousy goddamn grapes.Īt the end of the night I was down 10 grand on a slot machine with a max bet of $25.Īll the AI-controlled NPCs, though? In that same period of time they won hundreds of thousand of dollars. I'm not saying I never won anything-each slot has a symbol that pays off even if you only get one or two of them, but in all that time I hit three symbols exactly once. I played slots for two solid hours last night because in addition to having no life I wanted to gather evidence.

Slot machines are rigged