Maths of the Mystery Game in FarmVille

[Smokin JOE]

Just to tell you this ahead: I'm in no way a mathematician This was mostly based on my high school knowledge of probability theory, so if anyone can do it better or finds mistakes in my calculations, please let me know. Basically, I got this idea after reading through parts of this week's mystery game thread, where people (in old tradition) are posting their boards to help others and a discussion about whether there are similar boards or whether it is coincidence has started. I'm torn either way, but since I've had pretty good experiences with comparing boards I'm not too sure it's pure coincidence.

[fellah]

It's a formula that is used to calculate combinations, if there are some items that are the same. Such as the sheep (or any item besides the horse, for that matter). I really don't know where the formula came from, people that are smarter than me have written it but think about it this way:

If there were 25 extremely rare items in here (aka 25 different items) you would calculate the possible combinations with 25!. Another way to write this is 25!/1 or 25!/(1!*1!*1!*...). You get the idea. That's why the 1! for the horse is correct, because there is only one. I'm NOT calculating probability here, just the combinations.

[Jacob.d]

There are 520 trillion different boards, but itsn't it like flipping coins. Each Balloon has an x possibility of being an item each next balloon has the possibility of being an item minus the item you already have in the first attempt. I have seen boards with a few items at the same place, though i must still see the first 2 boards that have all the items in the same place. I think that chance is very slim to none, but could be wrong.

[Daniel23]

A lot of it depends on how they code the game. If they code the board to be randomly generated per person per object, then your statistics hold. But this method does involve a lot more crazy code. How I suspect they do it is to create a set number of boards and have that randomly generated per person. Then the statistics would be skewed since we don't know exactly how many boards they create. I would suspect that they have 50-100 pre-made boards that are the same every time. Then they randomize those for the players.

[Vayya]

In theory then, you could actully have two players that have every item in the same place except two that would be reversed. It would take some kind of a miracle for both to post their boards here. I'm always optimistic and want to believe that they only have a set number of different boards, like 100,000 and those are randomly selected. I know people were putting a lot of merit into the theory of which server you were on, but most of the boards I saw posted for the server I am on , were completely different than mine. The closest board matching mine (which helped me get the cow and sheep) was on server 2.

[Gavisht]

All I can say is the mysery game is a mysery. All I know is that I have a single in 25 chance of getting the top prize - when I really want that prize I seem to have to pop nearly every balloon, yet the lower prizes (as you say, 7 in 25) I seem to get everything but It's like it knows. So i think that its not predictable at all But still some calculation may help you out all the best.