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Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat–and Casinos Have No Fix

• FabHK 6y ago
  Should have used a cryptographically secure PRNG. The Mersenne Twister (for some reason still the default in many settings) has an insane period of 2^19937 − 1, but after observing 624 "random" values, you can recover the internal state and predict all the rest.
• RunningDroid 6y ago
  (2017)
• haltingproblem 6y ago
  In the late 90s I was part of a group that built a online casino for folks who ran a sports book in the Carribean. Due to legal woes which meant they could not land a license in their Island domicile, they ended up not launching it. I do remember we hired a post-doc from the Stats department at the nearby University. He insisted that we spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that the seed to the PRNG was as random as possible. The second thing was using PRNG's that had a long period and other desirable qualities but I think it would be vulnerable to hacking in this manner.