how speedrunners make their own luck

How I got here

Started with

How do speedrunners manipulate randomness?

Ended at

“rng manipulation explained”

The Trail

1. “rng manipulation speedrun how does it work” (google.com)
2. Pseudorandom number generator (en.wikipedia.org)
3. Linear congruential generator (en.wikipedia.org)

   the simplest kind, and a lot of old games use something like it

4. Doom (1993 video game) (en.wikipedia.org)

   doom's 'random' numbers come from a fixed table of 256 values

5. “rng manipulation explained” (reddit.com)

What I came away with

Old games use deterministic pseudorandom generators, and many advance them on a fixed schedule (every frame) or only when specific things happen. If you know how the generator steps, you can time a button press or take an exact number of steps and get the 'random' outcome you want.

Keep going

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