Quote:
Originally Posted by Robertie
And what is the motivation for rigging the dice in this (or some other way)? If I were the owner/designer of some new BG site, it seems to me that generating random dice would be the best way to go. What am I missing?
The Story of Mel seems appropriate here.
Excerpt:
After he finished the blackjack program...
he got a Change Request from the sales department.
The program used an elegant (optimized)
random number generator
to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck",
and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,
since sometimes the customers lost.
They wanted Mel to modify the program
so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
they could change the odds and let the customer win.
Mel balked.
He felt this was patently dishonest,
which it was,
and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,
which it did,
so he refused to do it.
The Head Salesman talked to Mel,
as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging,
a few Fellow Programmers.
Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
but he got the test backwards,
and, when the sense switch was turned on,
the program would cheat, winning every time.
Mel was delighted with this,
claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
and adamantly refused to fix it.
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html