Understanding The Role of RNG in the iGaming Industry
What is an RNG?
RNG - that’s a Random Number Generator to the uninitiated. And it does just what it says on the box: generates random numbers, via a computer program. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, you’d be wrong there.
There isn’t just one god-like RNG, that is used by people all over the world to generate these numbers randomly. Instead, there are hundreds, if not thousands of different RNGs people can use to generate random numbers. If you’re a programmer - a very clever one - you could even come up with your own and publish it for other people to use.
In fact, this is what plenty of people have done!
An Intro to Man-made Random Number Generation
You might think that randomness would be easy to come up with. The number of leaves on a plant, for instance, would be random, although you might hazard an estimate of your own. But coming up with random numbers easily from human invention - rather than nature - is a little trickier.
You’ll already know a few real-life, man-made random generators - coins, dice, and cards. A coin generates an outcome between one and two: heads or tails. Regular dice have a random number outcome between one and six. And a deck of cards that is shuffled to within an inch of its life will produce a card within a range of 52 cards.
However, these randomness generators are all pretty limited. What if we wanted a random number between one and a million? Well, back in 1947, the RAND Corporation did just that, releasing the book “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates”. After realizing that larger random numbers were critical to the field of probability, the corporation set about to create a computer program (via punch cards) that produced one million random digits.
They achieved this by creating an electronic roulette wheel, of which the spin outcome produced was determined by sampling a random frequency pulse source. The book was a hit among statisticians, engineers, computer scientists, and, more recently, internet trolls. As per a 2010 Amazon book review: “SPOILER ALERT: They just pretty much stay random the whole time, no plot twists or anything. I mean if you've seen one random number, you've seen them all.”
Why are RNGs Critical to iGaming?
Notice what all the random generators we’ve listed have in common: coins, dice, cards, roulette wheels? Yep, they’re all used in gambling activities.
The iGaming industry covers the entire online betting industry; from sports betting, to political outcomes betting, to lotteries, to - you guessed it - betting in online casinos.
The RAND Corporation built a machine back in the late 1940s to simulate a roulette wheel - an invention purely designed for gaming. So, it makes sense that random number generators and gambling/betting are so intertwined.
In iGaming, it’s critical for gaming providers to use random number generators to spin that roulette wheel on the screen, to deal your next card (when it’s not done by a live dealer), to stop that slots machine from spinning. If the way in which the number was produced wasn’t truly random, then the game itself would be biased. And if the game is biased, then it has the ability to be manipulated, or the outcomes either being determined, or more easily guessed. In games of chance, this is against the rules of the game.
How Can You be Sure an RNG is Actually Random?
Even devices that, at first glance, can appear to have a random outcome, may not actually be random enough. If a coin is weighted wrong, it can come up heads more often than tails, for example. Even the RAND Corporation’s original methods have been shown to have flaws. A Rand software engineer named Gary Briggs, many decades later, found that trying to reproduce the results with the same punch cards used in the machine produced statistically different results.
Technology has obviously come an extremely long way since the Million Digits book. But that’s not to say that newer RNGs are truly random. For instance, C’s rand algorithm has loose requirements.
C’s rand() is also a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). A pseudorandom number generator is given a seed number to work from to generate a sequence of random numbers. However, given the same seed, the same sequence will always be returned.
PRNGs and Gambling
In fact, gambling operators can patent their own RNGs, so that other companies cannot use them. They can also keep a PRNG algorithm secret, so that if a seed is given, a person cannot reverse engineer the algorithm.
This is exactly the case of what happened in the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis. It all started in Russia, when the country banned almost all sorts of gambling, and slots operators had to sell their machines off on the cheap - which inevitably found the machines in the hands of some unsavory characters. These people examined the insides of the machine and found that, given a sequence of numbers, they could predict the next outcome of a spin, based on when the spin button itself was pressed.
On the casino floor, that meant that fraudsters could log the outcomes of some spins, and then receive a buzz on their mobile phone, telling them when they should hit spin for the maximum returns on the game. For the scammers in a sophisticated network, this could equal a haul of $250,000 or so in a week!
RNGs and Gaming Legislation
iGaming providers need the RNGs they use to pass through the hoops required by their relevant gaming authority and meet legislation. This is to ensure that games remain fair for players and also to make sure they can’t be hacked. Computational RNGs are complex and the most “truly random” ones can be difficult to implement - such as sampling radioactive decay to generate random numbers. So next time you’re having a spin on the slots just think about the mind-boggling time spent by some of the world’s smartest people to get to this point.
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Hi there! I'm Steven. Editor in Chief at NoDepositQuest.com. We are constantly updating our site to make it the best resource for for Australian no deposit bonuses. Our ever evolving site is packed with useful information, tips and tricks that you will not find anywhere else. Our aim is to keep Australians playing longer and winning more.
