Unpredictable, ubiquitously rng seed
Can anyone think of an rng seed source that would produce a new unpredictable seed value at least once a day
You're really not asking about Game Design here. Moving this to a more suitable forum. Hope you get a good answer or a better solution.
Why not just use UTC date? It's the same for everyone no matter what, and changes exactly once per day.
Maybe weather or some other environmental variable. Like from the National Weather Service (weather.gov) or the Space Weather Prediction Center (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/). It'd be kinda cool to use x-ray flux or solar wind speed.
I think the best approach would be a known seed, but salted with a number supplied from both players. This way, a player cannot determine what the next seed will be for the next advance of the game state:
1. Player A and player B agree on a PRNG algorithm and a starting seed from a third party source. A random number table can work really well for this purpose.
2. At the end of each turn, each player decides on a non-zero number (the salt) that should be added to the seed.
3. On the start of the next turn, the sum of both the player's chosen salts are added to the seed.
4. Each player solves the new game state with his and the other player's actions, using the new seed.
The outcome of each turn can be verified, since the PRNG algorithm is known, the state of the seed is deterministic.
You could use that for your seed. Whatever the daily third-party dice roll email says to use, you use. Nobody can predict what it will be that day, although they could peek ahead once the roll is known.
@Tom Slooper: Sry, thx.
@Valrus: That site looks like a winner. In particular http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/text/daily-particle-indices.txt
@fastcall22: But if both players provide a chosen salt to each other the player who first receives their opponents salt could choose a salt that makes the final value most advantageous to themselves. The third party source still needs to be unpredictable unless the trading of actions where synchronized.
Stand up your own webpage that produces a number each day? I don't see why you can't run the shared source of random data...
Hi
As far as I can tell:
Given that I know the algorithm of the game and how it process the random number into game data.
I could create a table of seeds and the next few random numbers each seed will create.
If I want particular outcome I could chose a seed from my table that gives useful random number for my case.
If I have a big table it could be impossible for the opponent to identify if the seed was "prepared" or not.
Sisofys.