We’ve seen them often: On cruise ships, on casino floors, at bars and taverns – there’s a slot machine! But wait… it’s currently disabled. A player was curious about the inner workings.
When slots are disabled on a cruise, is it still running its algorithms? Or is it the same as being shut off?
Jacqueline H.
If you think of it like any other computer, when a slot is turned on, just like any other computer it goes through its boot-up process. In the case of slots, it has some security layers the average computer probably doesn’t have, but then it also has more standard steps any computer would do as well.
Once it’s on, a slot being disabled is really no different than any other computer that’s just on a locked screen – behind the scenes the computer is still booted up and set up to work at a moment’s notice when you’re ready. So yes, you’d be right in figuring everything under the hood is still operational at that point.
When the cruise ship activates all the slots, if you look around it’s practically instant – the disabled boxes go away and the slots are available to play right away. That’s another good sign everything’s basically humming away under the hood, because otherwise there’d be some sort of warm-up process needed to get things back into place.
Of course, modern equipment has much faster setups than older ones, thanks to improvements like solid state storage over hard drives and so on. But older slots work much the same way – they can be disabled and enabled but are still effectively up and running.
And ultimately, with the randomness of it all, it won’t make much difference even if it were shut down, because it’s still equally likely for an outcome to occur whether the slot was on or shut off for awhile, thanks to the Random Number Generator.
Have a question? Submit yours here!
