[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'156513\' date=\'Jul 2 2007, 10:42 AM\']
[quote name=\'beatlefreak84\' post=\'156506\' date=\'Jul 2 2007, 05:57 AM\']
One of my students then asked how the board worked, and I gave a brief description; another one then immediately asked, "So, why didn't they just make the board random in the first place? Would it have been more expensive to do so?"
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My guess (and this *is* a guess) is that if it were truly random, it wouldn't look as good on TV as it does with a rhythmically bouncing predetermined pattern, which to Joe Sixpack actually looks *more* random than a true random pattern (which could do things like bounce five or six straight times among three adjacent squares, for example). So I'm betting it was an aesthetic choice and they just never thought they hadn't complicated it enough to be hacked.
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There is more than one way to do a "random" sequence of lights. As Chris suggested, a random selection from 1 to n for each bounce will look bad, because we humans are wired to notice patterns, to the point of seeing them where no pattern exists. Something more akin to shuffling a deck of cards or the iPod's "random" feature would work better - take every possible outcome, put them in random order, and go through that order without skipping around. Every space gets "hit" exactly once per cycle, but the pattern is long enough to be hard to memorize on the fly. Cycle through three or four different sequences, and you could probably get away with randomizing things once per tape day.
There are some other rules that I could envision being added, like prevening two adjacent squares from being lit up back-to-back, or even employing some kind of probability function to mold the aesthetics of the bounces (weight towards being far away, but slightly against the exact opposite space, for instance,) but the more complicated the program, the more sophisticated the electronics would have to be, and the longer it would take to do the math.