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Is chance a real factor in solitaire computer card games or is it preprogrammed?

I play a lot of solitaire and I often find 3 of the same card number, varous suits, upppermost in the initial layout. Far more often than all red or all black. Is this really random chance? Or is it a programming factor?

It depends on the game, but programmers usually use code that generates what are called “pseudo random” numbers. Basically, they are not completely random (it is actually not possible to generate completely random numbers mechanistically, believe it or not!) but nor are they “predetermined” or “preprogrammed”. Nobody knows what the number sequence will be in advance (hence it is not predetermined) but yet, if you looked at a large portion of the number sequence, you would see some repeating patterns that would make it non-random.

In my experience as a programmer, number sequences are not “non-random” enough to make much of a visible difference for the user of the game. It would only be if you used statistical analysis to look at huge amounts of “pseudo-random” numbers taht you would start to see regularities.

Now, that being said, it could be that you are seeing number or color combinations that seem unusual to you (i.e., all cards w/ the same number) but are statistically fairly likely. So you’re looking at them and saying, that looks weird to me, but according to the rules of randomness, this should happen all the time.

One way of explaining this better would be that if we asked a person to come up with a set of ten “random” numbers, they might, off the top of their head, say “7, 4, 1, 9, 0, 3 …” etc. What they are doing is picking numbers that seem random to them (i.e., no numbers are repeated or in order), but they are not. A truly random sequence could just as well be “1, 3, 3, 4, 9, 9, 9 …” or for that matter, “0 , 0 , 0, 0 , 0 ….”! These weird looking random number sequences are just as likely (and just as unlikely) as “7. 4. 1. 9. 0, 3 …”. I hope that makes sense!

In other words, every time a set of cards comes up that has some kind of pattern, you look at them and say, well that’s weird! You notice the patterns. If a particular pattern comes up a few times, you notice it even more. But every time something that to a human mind would seem to be unpatterned (for example, a 4, a 7 and a K) comes up, you don’t notice it at all. It could be that the 4 7 K is repeated just as often as 4 4 4 — you just don’t see it! That’s how your brain — and all human brains — work! We’re hard-wired to see certain kinds of patterns.

That being said, it is definitely possible that the game programmer has a screwed up random number generator. But I think it’s more likely that you are seeing non-randomness even though it is really random (or close to it, that is!)

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