help acrion script Flash4 example "aliens game"

[warren]

Dear friends we write form Italy , so, sorry for our bad English.
We need some istructions (a sequence of action scripts) for the game
included in Flash4 example ( game of aliens) to make win one or another
alien with a variable percent (%) of probability.
The game is composed by three aliens. We would like one alien win 2 times on
100 (2%). The other two aliens win 49 times on 100 (49%).

Thank you
Matteo & Warren

[erlenmeyer71]

Matteo and Warren,

As you probably know, right now each racer is set to take a step that is from 2 to 6 pixels in length, selected randomly. The racetrack is 450 pixels long.

I'm no statistician, but I built a little flash program that runs those races dozens of times each second and counts which alien wins each race. I discovered that if you subtract .26 from one of the three aliens' movements each step, you come real close to a 2% win ratio for that alien. So, for instance, in frame four of the sample game, if you put an if statement in the Loop While, such as: If racer = 3, Set Property... = Get Property... - .26, you'll handicap racer 3 so that he only wins about 2% of the time.

Of course, you also need to make sure that racers=3, rather than having the computer pick a random number of racers.

Strange thing was, racer 1 was always around 52%, racer 2 46%, and racer 3 2%, even though the speeds of racers 1 and 2 were identical.. I guess computers can't ever do anything truly randomly. Or maybe there is no such thing as true randomness. I dunno.

If you want me to send you this alien-game-statistics-gathering .swf, just email me.

Greg