Random dot org

As much as I like STL mersenne_twister, I feel the need to verify my win percentages with a different random number generator. Of course, you can get random numbers online from http://www.random.org/. This is a pretty cool site and he uses atmospheric noise to generate random numbers. How good is that! It's a free service and he doles out "bit allowances" for generating numbers. His API is described here:

http://www.random.org/clients/http/

Of course he will sell additional allowances and I like his scheme. That said, I doubt I can pony up the dough for running a million deals. Like most Americans, I am nothing more than a wage/debt slave. The free bit allowance allows me to play about 600 hands so I played 500 and the game player won about 1 in 5.7 deals. This is within the ball park of my usual 1 in 5.37 deals so I am pretty happy with the results. I hope to email him with my hat in hand and see if he'll give me a million deals in the off hours or something.

So how hard was it to get random numbers off the internet? Not very. He has some samples posted and of course the link is stale. I googled the sample and found a good link. Here is a C++ program written by Doug Hague which will download the numbers:

https://github.com/doughague/random-dot-org

I pulled this down and tried to build it in VS2010. Of course it uses something called LibCurl. Édouard Tallent's blog has a nice write up on how to get it up and running under VS2010.

http://quantcorner.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/using-libcurl-with-visual-c-2010/

The thing also uses GNU option parsing but I know I don't need that. #ifdef NOTUSED. haha. I manually hack in the options I want. So I build the thing and of course there's a missing dll. The ole libsasl.dll is missing and I hunt this down and find it here:

libsasl.dll

Run and test this standalone. Works a treat! I add a function in place of main(), change the project to be a static library. I still need all the bonus dll's though. I add the static library project to my solitaire solution and I'm pretty close. I modify my deck object to deal using a sequence of numbers from random.org and there you have it. Solitaire dealt off of atmospheric noise.

Taking it to the next level

I have ported the program to x64. I have added multi-threading. I can keep eight cores going at 50% without increasing priority. Why do I do this? The holy grail is to prove that good deals are hard to lose. My preliminary runs support that hypothesis. You'll be hard pressed to lose a good deal regardless of the number of mistakes you make. I'll quantify this in upcoming posts.

From a computer geek point of view, reader/writer locks are your friends. I can't utilize processor unless I do a reader/writer lock on the list of unique card stacks. What's a reader/writer lock? I had a guy at work who went ballistic over this concept but it's pretty simple. If you are comparing card stacks, you can have as many threads as you want comparing card stacks. When you go to add a stack to the list, it is imperative that everyone be locked out of accessing the list of cards stacks. Thus a reader/writer lock lets all readers in, keeps writers out. When all pending readers are finished, the writer comes in and takes exclusive control of the list of card stacks. It works! She is your friend!