Blackjack Articles
Random Number Generators
A lot of online blackjack players worry that a computer can’t shuffle as well as an experienced dealer. They claim that computers follow patterns, and patterns can be predicted. These poor folks are constantly looking for some way to predict the next card that is going to come off the top of the deck. They’re probably wasting their time though.
The reason that most online computerized shufflers are better than any manual shuffle on the planet is simple: a Random Number Generator fuels it. In the early days of computing, the Random Number Generator (hereafter referred to as ‘RNG’) was a primitive thing. It was often based on John von Neumann’s ‘middle-square method’ from the 1940’s. It had a bad reputation, and for good reasons. It took a number, squared it, and took the middle numbers of the result as the ‘random number’. Of course, if you knew where in a sequence the middle square method was, you could emulate all future results! If modern blackjack sites were using something like this, you would be justified in worrying about how random the shuffling was.
Happily, the RNG’s of today are much more, well, random. Some use pure RNG randomization. Some use an emulated construction of order, like the Knuth shuffle or Fisher-Yates shuffle methods. Either of these involve moving through the pack from top to bottom, swapping every card with another card from a random position within the pack that has not yet been passed through. Knuth needs to be done perfectly to prevent biases, so more people are moving towards Fisher-Yates.
A lot of RNG’s these days use random physical events in the universe to generate the ‘seed’ or base numbers of their randomness. They might use hardware to measure some sort of radioactive decay that throws off random particles. That’s how serious the RNG business has gotten in recent years.
The result that you get is better than any hand shuffle on the planet. Shuffling by hand can result in cards clumping together, and not being fully randomized. The only way to approach the randomness of a modern Internet casino’s RNG, within a brick and mortar casino, is to use automatic shufflers that also incorporate an RNG somehow! This is done with ‘random ejection shufflers’, which use little hammers to randomly knock cards out of order, before shuffling.
Most online casinos these days have their RNG audited by an independent commission. They run extensive tests to make sure the operations are truly random, and they often are given power to spot check systems and investigate any issues that get reported. Industry watchdogs are very important to your safety online, because they keep casinos from getting complacent. If there are improvements in the industry that warrant the raising of standards, these are the folks who are going to press for that change.
I hope that this primer has set a few minds at ease. It’s very important to be aware of the conditions that you are gambling under, so use this information to perform your due diligence and research any nagging details about your particular online and offline gaming environments.
By Bill Ricardi
Blackjack Expert
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