I tried explaining it in my OP in the lottery thread, but I can try again. You guys pick three numbers. My program picks three numbers. If one of you guys picked the exact three numbers the program picks, that's an instant win. If that isn't the case (which it usually won't be, as there are over one million possible combinations of three numbers, and it would thus take over half a million participants to even make the chance of a perfect match 50%) then the program will calculate each participant's "distance" to the winning numbers, which is calculated as follows, where pcX is playerChoiceX and rnX is randomNumberX: distance = |pc1 - rn1| + |pc2 - rn2| + |pc3 - rn3|. The player with the smallest distance is then chosen as the winner. If there's a tie, the round is considered invalid, and another round starts. There will be a total of 10 (valid) rounds, where the winner of each such round will receive 21k. Does that help? EDIT: To give an example of how the formula I posted above works, here are the winning numbers from my example above: (1, 62, 47) And here are Bugmo1207's chosen numbers: 4 67 44 Plug the numbers into the formula, and you get distance = |4 - 1| + |62 - 67| + |47 - 44| distance = |3| + |-5| + |3| distance = 3 + 5 + 3 distance = 11 Which was the shortest distance in that round, which is why Bugmo1207 was chosen as its winner.
It's fun to play with numbers. Here are some statistics based on the participants we have so far (72): There are still between 45-60 unused numbers in each number group to pick from. The sum of numbers picked as the first is 2029, second is 3298 and third is 4022. Clearly, people are picking their numbers in a rising manner. margaritte has chosen the numbers with the greatest distance between them (average 61.333). Zoebearfun105 has chosen the numbers with the smallest distance between them (average 1.333) The average distance people are choosing numbers from is 34. There are still 1,030,229 combinations of numbers to pick from. There have been no duplicate choices yet. Well, I'm not very imaginative with numbers, but I do love to play with them. If someone can think up other interesting stats I can pull out of what I've got, feel free to suggest.
Just wanted to point this out as I don't think hardly anyone who entered actually read the entire OP. A few of the entrants have even disqualified themselves according to the text I highlighted above.
Yeah, about that... I decided to be a little lenient about that rule. I just said it that strongly to try to discourage any unnecessary noise in the thread. Of course, I reserve the right to still enforce that rule at my own discretion.
Oh okay, I was merely posting it for the benefit of them. That's good that your being felxible about that rule
Don't worry, the rules only say you can't pick the same three numbers as another person. If you have two numbers that are the same as another participant, that's fine.
I'm only "leaving" the game. I'm going to be on the forums, and I haven't really been very active on EMC anyway for a long time now. I'm sorry to say that I just don't find vanilla minecraft very interesting anymore, and I have a feeling EMC isn't going to change on their policies, so... that's the way it's going to have to be for me.
Thanks for the update! I can't wait to hear who the winners are! Again thank you, for hosting such an awesome give away!
