The shuffle that isn't
The most common randomisation bug in JavaScript:
const shuffled = items.sort(() => Math.random() - 0.5); // WRONG
It looks fine and it's everywhere. It is not a shuffle. Sort comparators are expected to be consistent, and this one isn't, so the engine's sort produces skewed permutations.
Measured on four quiz options:
| Position | Chance the correct answer lands there |
|---|---|
| 0 | 28.3% |
| 1 | 28.2% |
| 2 | 24.7% |
| 3 | 18.8% |
Uniform would be 25% each. In practice, always guessing the first option beat guessing at random — a player who noticed would have an edge, and the quiz was quietly unfair.
The fix
Fisher–Yates, once, in a helper:
function shuffle(a) {
const out = [...a];
for (let i = out.length - 1; i > 0; i--) {
const j = Math.floor(Math.random() * (i + 1));
[out[i], out[j]] = [out[j], out[i]];
}
return out;
}
Then replace every site. The bug usually appears more than once — one codebase had it in eleven places: shuffling quiz options, picking which questions appeared, choosing which items were offered, ordering menu choices. Each one skewed something slightly.
Don't blanket-replace on a pattern match. (Math.random() - 0.5) also shows
up legitimately as noise in physics and jitter:
velocity += (Math.random() - 0.5) * 0.012; // leave this alone
Check each hit is actually a sort comparator.
Test the distribution
Don't eyeball randomness. Count it:
const pos = [0,0,0,0], N = 200000;
for (let i = 0; i < N; i++) {
const order = shuffle(['a','b','c','d'].map((t,i) => [t,i]));
pos[order.findIndex(o => o[1] === 0)]++;
}
pos.forEach((c,i) => console.log(i, (c/N*100).toFixed(1) + '%'));
Spread above about 3 percentage points across positions means something's biased.
Use a proper generator for the test. A hand-rolled linear congruential
generator produced 1–2 point "errors" that looked like a real bug but were the
test's own fault. Math.random() is uniform enough for checking distributions —
save the custom generator for when you need reproducible seeds, and validate it
separately.
Check the odds you show people
If you display odds anywhere — a percentage, a progress bar, a chance of success — make sure they match what the code actually rolls. Simulate the real roll a few hundred thousand times and compare:
cred 0 shown 5.0%/40.0%/55.0% actual 5.0%/40.0%/55.0%
cred 100 shown 40.0%/40.0%/20.0% actual 40.0%/40.1%/20.0%
Worst error under half a percentage point means the display isn't lying. A shown probability that the outcome doesn't honour is worse than showing nothing, because people make decisions on it.
While you're in there
Check that a stated goal is actually reachable. A counter reading "3 of 5" tells players 5 is the target; if 5 happens 0.17% of the time, the interface is promising something that effectively never happens. Work out the real odds of every milestone you display.