I'm a man of little means...

[Mental]

...yet as small as my disposable income is, I keep spending it on Microsoft Points. An odd thing happened today. I looked at the Microsoft Point symbol and thought "Oh, how pretty." And some variant on "I should invest."

[Mental]

For instance, an odd thing just happened. I've been meaning to buy a Tarot deck for awhile, I love them and my mom taught me how to read them, but I didn't feel like going out, and didn't feel I really had the money to spend on an "extravagance".

Well, I just looked on Indie 360 Games and somebody's selling a Tarot app. I bought it sight unseen because the one thing I knew it would have is pictures of the cards. And it cost like $2.50. I'd almost rather have the electronic version as well.

I think the forces that be are trying to tell me something. I probably just saved money by buying and spending Microsoft points, completely by surprise, as well as time.

Sorry, Zeus. I may convert a lot of what little currency I have left into MicroPoints, and I wish the symbol was in Unicode (who knows, given "M$", it probably already is).

You can call them M$ with me though. I see it as a compliment to them. They're good at making money.

[SineSwiper]

As a guy who is into Tarot cards, I can say that an electronic version is completely useless. While there are rules that you can use to Tarot, it does not have to follow a strict set of rules. I do not like traditional Tarot cards, anyway. This is my favorite.

Also, depending on what you believe, there's not a lot of "spiritual qualities" over an XBox 360. You cannot personally control the randomness of a deck of cards when they are in a TV.

[Mental]

horse pucky. i have been reading tarot cards on and off since about the age of 16. there's plenty of spirit in electronics. paper chauvinism has to go. i just bought a deck that required no destruction of trees (which is important to me as a green) and works perfectly well. the idea that computers or electronics have no spirit is a false one that needs to be vaporized.

[Zeus]

You can call them M$ with me though. I see it as a compliment to them. They're good at making money.

Oh, buddy, that term is used in the most derogatory manner possible from the customer's point of view. It sure as hell ain't no compliment on any level when I use it.

[Mental]

Hey, I may go put in a resume at some point. XNA has changed my life. I hardly even care anymore when they do rob me blind.

[Mental]

As a guy who is into Tarot cards, I can say that an electronic version is completely useless.

This irks me just as much the second time I read it. I bet you I've been reading the Tarot as long or longer than you. Need to brush up, but I'm not a neophyte except in the wider spiritual sense.

[Kupek]

The tarot app almost certainly uses a pseudo-random number generator, so the outcome is deterministic.

[Mental]

The outcome is always deterministic. You telling me shuffling is really random?

[Mental]

I would bet a pseudorandom generator is far more random than shuffling. Shuffling can be incomplete, cards can stick together and etc.

[SineSwiper]

I would bet a pseudorandom generator is far more random than shuffling. Shuffling can be incomplete, cards can stick together and etc.

That's precisely why electronic wouldn't work well. Computers are TOO good at randomness. Shuffling is supposed to be incomplete, or at least to the point that the cards are in your control.

If the spirits are indeed influencing the outcome of the cards, the best way is to guide you towards that influence is if you controlled the cards, cut them as you feel is right, and promote the ones that you feel should be going to the top.

I'm not advocating "cheating" by actually looking at the cards, but you should have the cards IN YOUR HAND as a better method of control.

This irks me just as much the second time I read it. I bet you I've been reading the Tarot as long or longer than you. Need to brush up, but I'm not a neophyte except in the wider spiritual sense.

It's not necessary to turn this into a pissing contest. You probably have been reading Tarot longer than me, but people still consider me to be good at Tarot reading. Whether that is because of my skills at Tarot reading, an ability to tap into what the spirits are saying, or me having good empathy skills is up to interpretation.

I believe that both the spiritual theory, that Tarot reading is a way to connect to the spirits, or the psychological theory, that Tarot reading is a way to get people to talk about their problems in a psychiatric-like environment, are equally valid. However, if the former is indeed true, keeping that connection grounded in physical media is important.

[Mental]

um, i find my 360 to be a perfect environment. i did a few readings the other night and it was SCARY how on they were. i could not have picked more appropriate cards for the positions.

[Julius Seeker]

Just my take. I don't see how pieces of cardboard packaged in a factory are any more reliable at channelling spirits than an electronic machine packaged in a factory. Neither are sacred artefacts, both are sold to make money. If indeed the power is in the individual and not the cards, you should be experimenting with more effective methods than a set of cards; I don't see how spirits would prefer such a limited and vague method of communication, if indeed the power is not in the cards but the individual.

In other words, I don't see how a computerized method is less legit than a cardboard method.

[Mental]

Word, my ninja. I call that "paper chauvinism". It's pretty widespread, this idea that you have to have a physical form for something in order for it to have a spirit or to relate to it. But electronics are "physical" too - we're all made out of matter and energy and mediated by light whether you are purely made of physical matter or you are a stream of electrons representing a videogame character inside a console. Personally I'm very happy to see my Tarot reacquired without the need to kill more plants.

[Mental]

Well, I guess if you're *just* electrons you're actually just a cloud of probability and potential, sorta. Still very related to the physical world however. You tell a bolt of lightning it has no spirit as it obliterates you from above...

[Kupek]

The outcome is always deterministic. You telling me shuffling is really random? :P

I don't think you understand what "random" means. In colloquial speech, we use "random" to imply "uniformly random." That's not what it actually means. It means a process which is not deterministic; one in which you may have a probabilistic description of what will happen, but only that. You do not know the outcome before the process completes. Pseudo-random number generators are deterministic. That's why they called pseudo-random. The number streams are close enough to random for some purposes, but they are not actually random. Given the same seed, a given generator will always produce the same stream of numbers.

Shuffling cards is a random process. You will not achieve uniform entropy with the cards, but is not deterministic.

[Don]

Actually if you can shuffle perfectly then the process is no longer random and is deterministic.

It is because you can't shuffle perfectly, and further you don't know how imperfectly you will shuffle, that the process is nondeterministic.

[Kupek]

That's not accurate. First, I assume by "perfect shuffling" you mean a card shuffling which achieves highest possible entropy, where the chances of picking any particular card out of the deck is 1/52, which also implies there's no relationship being that action and the previous order the cards were in.

If that's the case, then you have a known distribution. Picking a number from a known distribution is a random process; it is not deterministic because you do not know what number you will get. That you know the distribution the number came from in no way changes that the process is random.

An "imperfect" shuffling changes it to be an unknown distribution. But that is no more "random" than picking a number from an unknown distribution.

[Don]

I assume perfect like this, say you got 8 cards, then you separate them into a pile of 1 2 3 4 and 5 6 7 8, and end up with 1 5 2 6 3 7 4 8. Otherwise perfect doesn't make much sense in the context of other ways you can shuffle the cards. If you can do this the result is completely deterministic. You can know exactly what cards will be where after each shuffle every single time.

Now if you're shuffling imperfectly then the cards probably stick together at some point, or you didn't grab exactly half of the cards, then it is random and nondeterministic because you don't know how the cards will stick and so on. The only way you can predict the outcome is if you know the state of the universe (e.g. what cards sticked with what) but then, even stuff like the butterfly efect can be predicted deterministically if you know the state of the entire universe.

[Mental]

The outcome is always deterministic. You telling me shuffling is really random?

I don't think you understand what "random" means. In colloquial speech, we use "random" to imply "uniformly random." That's not what it actually means. It means a process which is not deterministic; one in which you may have a probabilistic description of what will happen, but only that. You do not know the outcome before the process completes. Pseudo-random number generators are deterministic. That's why they called pseudo-random. The number streams are close enough to random for some purposes, but they are not actually random. Given the same seed, a given generator will always produce the same stream of numbers.

Shuffling cards is a random process. You will not achieve uniform entropy with the cards, but is not deterministic.

I started studying college-level physics in eighth-grade. Let's have another pissing match about semantics, please. NEITHER is random. The Tarot generator is psuedorandom. Shuffling is also NOT RANDOM as it depends on the initial placement of the cards in your deck before you start shuffling, the impulse you put on the deck each time you shuffle and recollect it, the physical movements of your hands, etc. Same as how a die's final position depends - as far as we know - only on the speed, position, and rotation with which it begins the initial throw and on the obstacles it encounters upon coming to rest. Or are you trying to tell me that if I throw a die with inputs precisely known, I won't get a predictable answer?

BOTH SIMULATE RANDOMNESS - one physically, one algorithmically. You're not going to have "true" randomness unless you grab a radioactive atom and stick something capable of reading a decay next to it - according to quantum theory - and even then I'm not convinced that there are things behind that which we humans can't explain or understand which make things slightly less "random" than we currently understand to be the case. A suitable appearance of randomness and presence of a moderately chaotic factor is, really, all you need. Physical phenomena usually flow predictably to a final from an initial state if input quantities are measured and known. Psuedorandom algorithms give a predictable value, but only if the pseudorandom algorithm is known. From MY point of view doing a single reading, the appearance of each differs little as to how "random" the card really is. My personal opinion is that most "pseudorandom" generators get in trouble because the "pseudorandomness" of their space is not sufficiently "random" - i.e., chaotic - to meet users' needs.

[Kupek]

I assume perfect like this, say you got 8 cards, then you separate them into a pile of 1 2 3 4 and 5 6 7 8, and end up with 1 5 2 6 3 7 4 8. Otherwise perfect doesn't make much sense in the context of other ways you can shuffle the cards. If you can do this the result is completely deterministic. You can know exactly what cards will be where after each shuffle every single time.

I agree that process is deterministic, but I also wouldn't call that "perfect shuffling." To me, perfect shuffling is the highest possible entropy from the initial state. You could test for this experimentally by determining if the resulting card positions have any correlation with the initial card positions over many shuffles.

Shuffling and throwing dice are random processes because their outcomes can only be determined probabilistically. The amount of information you would need to, with close to 100% accuracy, predict the outcome is practically infinite. You would need to take into account the entire state - brain and all - of the person performing the act to know exactly what motions they were going to make. You would further need an analytical model of a person. You would also need to take into account the amount of friction on the cards, or the friction between the dice and someone's hand. The randomness is not in the flight of the die or the movement of the cards. It's in the person performing the act.

They are random processes, which can be shown experimentally: their outcomes, over large populations, obey the predicted probability distributions. Pseudo-random number generators are a completely different beast: given the seed number and an algorithm, we know exactly what numbers it will produce. Over large enough populations, numbers from pseudo-random number generators will exhibit patterns and deviate from what we'd expect from true randomness.

End result: simulation based on pseudo-random number generators are quantifiably different than processes based on true randomness. For some tasks, this may not matter.

[Don]

Everything in the world is deterministic if you know the exact state of the universe when something is about to occur. But I think most people use 'nondeterministic' to mean like 'things you can't know for sure without knowing the state of the universe'. A pseudo random number generator is deterministic, because you only have to know the algorithm it used, and the current seed value. Rolling a die is usually considered nondeterministic because to know what the result is, you'd have to know the state of the universe at the time of the roll.

The butterfly effect is deterministic if you can model the state of the climate of the entire world, but we usually think of that as an example of nondeterminism because we cannot model the state of the world with any reasonable accuracy.

[Chris]

my penis is deteministic. It is determined to go inside a vajay.

[Flip]

my penis is deteministic. It is determined to go inside a vajay.

or a cornhole?

[Chris]

my penis is deteministic. It is determined to go inside a vajay.

or a cornhole?

it could be the tp for a bung hole

[SineSwiper]

my penis is deteministic. It is determined to go inside a vajay.

or a cornhole?

Doesn't that make it random?

[Flip]

my penis is deteministic. It is determined to go inside a vajay.

or a cornhole?

Doesn't that make it random?

That was my subtle point.

haha.