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Slot machines have come a long way since their humble beginnings with three reels of four symbols spinning slowly with a ratchet mechanism to stop the reels in the right position.
Slot machines today all fully computerized and offer some advanced features, reliability and stability for the players of today. The best thing is that the slot machines that you find online have the same programming for the games as the slots in real casinos do, so you can be sure that they online slot machines are the best available.
The heart of the modern slot machine is the Random Number Generator (RNG). The RNG is a separate small processor that only has one job, and that is to produce millions of random numbers every second. The RNG never stops producing these numbers and just keeps on spitting them out for its entire life.
When you press the button on a slot machine the computer takes the next group of numbers that the RNG computes. If you’re playing a 3-reel machine, the computer will take the next 3 numbers. If you’re playing a 5-reel machine, the computer will take the next five numbers. These numbers tell the computer where to stop each reel.
The computer takes the random number for that reel and divides it by a computer-friendly number to find the remainder. These are usually 64, 128, 256 or 512 as computers work well with these multiples of 2. As an example, let’s say that our computer divides the number by 128 and returns the remainder that is left over. If the number is 10,367,343 the remainder is 111. This number will always be between 0 and 127. Each reel has up to 20 symbols on it, and each symbol relates to a number between 0 and 127. As there are more numbers then there are symbols, some symbols have more numbers allocated to them then others. This gives those symbols a higher weight meaning that they will be shown more often.
Slot machines work randomly to produce results, but as you can see, the results can be skewed one way or the other by how the symbols on each reel are weighted. When you combine this with the prize amounts for the winning combinations, it’s easy for the manufactures of the slot machines to produce machines that have proper payout percentages and probabilities for the casinos.
