If you are anything like me, as soon as websites start going on about anything that they refer to in abbreviation, for example RNG, I switch off and hope it’s not important. After all, if it was really important, or indeed understandable, they wouldn’t talk about it in code, right? Well, I got a bit of a shock when someone actually explained to me what RNG was – it’s really quite interesting, and useful: listen up!

RNG stands for Random Number Generation and it’s a technology that is used to imitate any other form of creating randomness like a shuffle or a dice throw. So, when a website tells you that they’re RNG is the best, they mean that they’re numbers are the most like a naturally randomly generated result, like me shuffling a deck. RNG, because it’s entirely computer reliant is also very safe as it isn’t susceptible to human corruption such as not being a good shuffler, or not giving a strong spin.

Now, in terms of slots this is really interesting. In the good old days there would be wheels inside the machine that would spin and give us a randomly generated result in the shape of images that lined up. Today however, our slot machines don’t have wheels, of course they don’t; apart from anything else they’re on line! So how do they create the results?

Most of our modern slots are categorized as ‘3 reel’, ‘5 reel’, or ‘7 reel’, but we’ve already said that there aren’t actually any reels, so what is this referring to. The modern slots have instead of physical reels, a sequence of images that may be displayed on virtual wheel. These sequences of images are far more numerous than was ever possible on slots with physical reels because there simply wasn’t enough space. On a video slot for instance, there may be a sequence of let’s say 147 possible positions which correspond to the symbols that appear on your screen. A computer using the RNG technology will spit out combination after combination of numbers. Each of these numbers will tell the virtual reel to go to the corresponding position on the virtual reel sequence. So, for example, on a 3 reel slot there will be 3 sets of sequences; each sequence will consist of 147 positions which in turn will be represented by a symbol on your screen. The RNG will spit out numbers, maybe 45, 98, and 138. The computer then knows to send the first reel to position 45 in its sequence, the second to 98 in its sequence, and the third to 138 in its sequence. This then gets represented on your screen with the spinning of a reel.

So now you now you know what RNG is and how they managed to fit all of those cherries into such a small space!