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No matter how many audits are carried out and in how much detail they will simply say that the audited code and controls are bypassed.
That's not true. Just like in financial services a good auditor would spot discrepancies, a good code auditor could spot some kind of cover up. If I knew that every programmer had access to the base source code, and I saw that code, I'd be content that there isn't some massive conspiracy among all of them.
Like I said, the only way I think something like that could be pulled off, is if the *shuffled deck* object is created and maintained by a very small group of programmers, and to all the other programmers this object functions as something of a black box. IE - it just spits out cards when requested of it. If that were the case, and I was auditing the code, I would want to do a lot more digging into the source code for the shuffled deck, see some live builds of the code in action, randomly access a few servers poking around for alternate code, etc.
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If you are worried your only intelligent recourse is to learn a great deal about probability maths and computer programming and test large hand histories yourself.
My concern on that would be that any card discrepancies that would show up from favoring the kind of players I described (new, Euro, been gone for a while, etc.) might be so slight - that I don't think we could guarantee they would be statistically significant. It's very hard to say how much more often those people would need to suckout, which would lead to I guess slightly higher chances of aces (which would also be canceled out by the lower chance of aces we expect to observe - but by how much?), or lower cards maybe? And if the bias is also slanted against good players not sucking out as much, maybe the cards still end up distributing evenly. This I think is a very interesting problem. And it could very well be after working on the problem a while, one could come up with a convincing thesis that given the kind of rigging I described you would see some anomolies. But I don't think you can just wave your hands and say that any kind of rigging would definitely show up in a giant card distribution.
Also, again just for the sake of argument, lets say there's some threshold for the rigging to occur - like showdowns of more than 1/2 buyin in equity. IF the software was smart enough to rig in these spots, it wouldn't be much tougher for it to keep track of the two cards involved in the rigging (the one that should have been dealt and the one that was) and then just swap those two cards later in some meaningless spot (IE if the "rig" card comes up in a meaningless spot, use the "replaced" card instead). I'm pretty sure that would nullify any anomalies that would show up in a card distribution. Maybe a card distribution of only high equity showdowns would be more useful. Has anyone done one of those?
Again, to be clear I don't think there's very much realistic chance of any of this being true. I just would like to *know* that it isn't, at least to the same degree of certainty that I know bank transaction software isn't screwing me (it's been tested, audited, ISO certified, Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, etc).
Oh yeah, I know Josem IRL and trust him. If he tells me he asked around and the shuffled deck object isn't a black box, that's good enough for me. Just don't ask the old timey guy, ask a new guy.
Last edited by suzzer99; 06-18-2009 at 02:37 PM.