I’ve posted a few times now about RuneScape, and since recently I’ve been falling behind on my GitHub commits, I figured I’d do it again.

Backstory

Shortly after deciding to make RuneScape 2 in 3D, I started to message my good friend a3qz some thoughts on how one could do fair gambling in the game Old School RuneScape. You see, ever since I was a kid, people would gamble in the game. This typically took the form of using the Duel Arena and staking, but it also involved planting flowers and betting on what color grew. More recently, bots have flooded the game that effectively pick a random number between 1 and 100, and you win if you roll above, say, 60.

These are almost certainly a scam, and not just because of the odds favoring the house. We have no way to know if the RNG it is using is fair - it could even just always have you lose! In fact, I’d definitely believe that they always have legitimate players lose, and have an allow-list of users who will win that are in on the scam. Even if the source code was available for us to read, there would be no way for us to verify that that’s the actual code that’s running. So how can we gamble in our MMO with confidence that everything is fair?

Well, rather than just go and read about all the solutions that I’m sure exist, I thought it would be fun to think through this problem. Big disclaimer, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about here, so don’t like, treat any of this as accurate or “good”.

Decks of Cards

In real life, decks of 52 playing cards are commonly used for gambling. I don’t really have much experience with that - while recently driving from Western Massachusetts to Northern California, I stopped at a casino in Nevada with $10 in my pocket, and 4 confusing hands of video blackjack later I had no more money. But anyway, shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing them is a common thing in gambling. So one thing we could do is shuffle a deck of cards, hash it, and tell the players what the hash is. Then, after the game is played, we reveal the original deck, and they can verify that the deck used was set in stone at the beginning, that is, that the house didn’t change it midway through for their advantage. This solves our issues, right?

Well, no - the house could be dishonest and only issue decks that it knows are likely to advantage the dealer. In black jack, this could mean having a ten, a two, and another ten be the cards meant for the player, as they are likely to hit on a 12 (and would bust), and if they stand, the house can ensure they’ll get to 17 or higher without busting, beating the 12.

So what if we went with a game that doesn’t let the house cheat like this? In the gameshow Cardsharks, there is a deck of cards that players will draw from, guessing if the next card will be higher or lower than the most recently drawn card. We could do the same thing, right? Shuffle a deck, hash it, send the hash, draw one card, reveal it, ask for high-or-low, and then draw another, and reveal the deck?

Again this kinda won’t work. Two decks can hash to the same value, so the dishonest house could find pairs of decks with the same first card and the same hash, but with different answers for “is the second card higher or lower than the second?” Then, the cheaters could just choose which deck to go with after getting your answer. Fooey.

Maybe an Approach that Works

Should “that” be capitalized? I don’t know.

We could try moving away from decks for a bit, to think about more simple games. Perhaps the simplest betting game is the house flips a coin, and the player guesses heads or tails. Now, obviously you cannot have the player guess first, since the house could just always say the opposite of what the player said. And even if the house flips first, they could just lie about it. So what can we do?

Well, one approach could be to flip a coin, and then based off the result of the coin flip the house can generate a difficult computational problem such that the problem has a “yes” answer if the coin is heads, and a “no” answer if the coin is tails. Now, these problems would have to be big enough that they are both hard to solve and also unlikely to be generated twice and the result memorized.

For example, the house could flip a coin. If it is heads, the house sends a random prime number to the player, and if it is tails, they send a random composite number. The player then gets a few seconds to answer (so as to not get to cheat and solve the difficult computational problem), and after they make their guess, the house reveals the answer. The player can then verify that they were honest, and there is no way for the house to have changed the game midway through.

This does work, but it has the unfortunate side effect of giving the player a slight edge - they could try a few random solutions to the computational problem and could get lucky and find it in time. This might be counteracted by the time constraint - maybe the player’s internet is more likely to drop out for a few seconds than they are actually solve whatever the chosen problem is in the time constraint. It’s hard to know this for certain, though. Another downside is that the game only has two outcomes, whereas real gambling games have like, several. Roulette, for example, has 38 different outcomes. That’s not a power of two last time I checked, so we cannot simply repeat this game 5 or 6 times and have it map nicely.

An Apprach That Probably Doesn’t Work

Well, ok, what if instead of sending prime or composite, we always send a composite. This composite will be semi-prime, that is, the product of two primes. These primes will be randomly chosen. Let X be the larger of the two primes. What we bet on now is what the value of X mod 7 is. Because X is prime, this will never be 0 (because then X is divisible by 7 and therefore not prime), and will always take on values between 1 and 6. Hey, that’s like, the values from a die! And, as far as I know, all values are equally likely to show up. Neat.

But wait, the example I just gave is Roulette, which has 38 possible numbers. So like, can we take X modulo 39? Well, no, because 39 is not prime. No prime, for example, is congruent to 36 modulo 39: that would mean the prime is equal to 39x + 36 for some integer x >= 0, which we can express as 3(13x + 12), meaning it would be divisible by 3 and therefore not prime. So how can we do a Roulette wheel with this silly idea?

Well, to give Y different possibilites, we just need to find a prime X that equals kY+1 for some integer k >= 1. Then, after we find our dice roll modulo X, we divide it by k (rounding down) to put it back into Y buckets. Easy!

So, to have 38 different possible rolls, we need a prime that equals 38k+1. It turns out k=5 gives us 191, which is prime. Yay! So to generate a Roulette spin, we generate two random primes and multiply them together. The larger of the two primes, we’ll call it X, we take and figure out X mod 191. There will be 190 possible results here, all roughly equally likely. We take X mod 191, and we divide it by 5, flooring that result. That will now give us one of 38 different results, all roughly equally likely. We can share our semiprime, and then ask our player what they are betting on. Once they answer, we can reveal the factorization of our semiprime, which the player can use to verify our honesty.

A quick sidenote, before posting this I was made aware of Chebyshev’s bias, which does imply that this approach is flawed, as it is slightly unfair. Oh well.

Why All This?

A method like the one I described has the benefit that the house really cannot play dishonestly. I mean, they could cheat by picking the results, but by asking the player for input, such as “what will this land on?”, it’s actually in the house’s best interest to actually choose random numbers, as otherwise the house’s strategy could be exploitable.

I feel the input part of this is crucial. I mentioned earlier that a dishonest house could just purposely choose random seeds or decks that favor them beyond the accepted house odds.