On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Reece, Tom - 25IDL G4 wrote:

>
> Upon making 30th level I quickly maxxed out all my bard skills except for
> brass. Yesterday I got four straight missed notes when trying to start up
> selos. I had just logged into the game, wasn't in combat, and had no lag
> problems. If there is a base chance of 5% for missing a note, the chances
> of me failing to start selos on four straight attempts was 0.00000625 (5% x
> 5% x 5% x 5%). I think the random number generator was definately not
> acting very random on this occasion.

Grrr, I've been wrestling with this for a while - it's a
deceptively difficult problem to solve.

The 0.00000625 (or 1 in 160,000) is the chance of 4 failures
given only 4 attempts. If you go up to 5 attempts, the chance
of getting 4 consecutive failures is 1 in 82,051.

atmpts odds
4 1 in 160,000
5 1 in 82,051
6 1 in 55,172
7 1 in 41,558
8 1 in 33,333

Unfortunately, after 8, the permutations start to repeat, and
I wasn't able to figure out a pattern to it. ("Consecutive"
is the monkey wrench - if you do more than 8 attempts, it's
possible to have multiple occurrances of 4 consecutive
failures) But as you can see, the odds do get better rather
quickly. Given you probably stop/start songs a couple hundred
times each time you play, and have been playing the game for
over half a year now, I wouldn't consider seeing one string of
4 consecutive failures on a maxed skill to be unusual.

I'll have to use this problem as a brain teaser on my
friends... :)

--
John H. Kim
kim@...