stale games
Anonymous
GUESTS
I know you have said that games don't repeat but you are wrong. I have been keeping track with notes & games are repeating very regularly, & not only the game of the day. I have clicked "new game" repeatedly, only to find a game I have already played once again. If there can not be a REAL shuffling to get new games, I will have to find another site.
Comments
Do you ever play a game and then close the browser window when you get stuck? That is one case where we wouldn't register the game as being played and we might give that same game back to you next time.
-David
As David says, it's probably a bug, but we'll need more details to figure out what we're doing wrong. Do you perchance play from two separate computers? I think we have a bug where if you did you might see duplicate games.
-Jim
I did not keep extensive notes but will try to do a screen capture from now on. They were just notations of card placement to jog my memory if I saw the same game 3 or more times.
Yes I have shut the browser on occasion but that would not account for all the repeats. It seems like the games are set up in a certain rotation instead of the cards being really shuffled to create a new game.
(I play a lot as I am retired & a disabled shut in.)
The game number is shown to the right of the "Auto-finish" button. It represents a unique shuffle of the cards. So the question becomes, are you seeing game numbers repeat, or are you seeing different game numbers with the same basic card layout? That would point out which part of the code is causing you to see repeat games.
If you could report back with some game numbers then we could look them up and see what is going on first hand.
As and aside, we don't ask for your email when you sign up--We hate that too. :-) Our sign up is just a simple user name and password (from time to time we've considered adding an optional email address just for password recovery, but it's not high on our list of priorities). When you are logged in not only does your name shows up on the high score table, but we also use a different method to choose games when you click "new game": We look through our database and find games that other people have played but that you have not. The point is you might get less repeat game while logged in. But we'd also like to fix any bugs in anonymous mode so we'd love it if you could keep track of the game numbers and report back to us.
-David
However I pretty much stuck with plain Klondyke today to make this simpler. I will try other types of games tom.
Thanks for the feedback. Let us know the game numbers if any "similar" games you find. It's possible our random number generator is not very random.
-Jim
I'd say your random number generator is initialized to the same sequence for different users. I notice that if I play 20 or 30 games at night, Evelyn 1958 has played many of the same games within a few minutes of me. (Not that I'm complaining - I've been challenging myself to beat her times.)
That is by design. Every hour there's a new random seed and everyone plays the same set of games in that hour. That helps make the site feel like there's always people playing. We (foolishly?) used 32 bits for our game # which comes to roughly 4 billion possible games. If everyone played a true random game there would hardly ever be a 2nd person playing a given game #.
We attempt to keep track of which games have been played in that hourly "seed chain" (as we call it), and so when people complain of repeats if makes me think there's a bug in that code somewhere, but we haven't been able to find it (it's pretty simple). We do store that info in a cookie, so if you play in private browsing mode or clear your cookies out then it will repeat. But I get the sense that when people have repeating games that something else is going on.
Because I'm slightly odd I play a 'user generated' game every day using the date (English, not US!) as a number - so for instance I created 131115 today. I've never seen any other user having tried these games, so presumably they don't ever form part of the hourly seed chain - do you have any way to pick up user created games too? I'm sure I'm not the only one out there creating them - I hope I'm not...;-)