The modern day slot machines are poles apart from the traditional ones. Tension and springs were used in the traditional mechanical slots to decide the point on which the reels would come to a halt. The modern electronic slot machines employ a complicated electronic method to decide the result of the spin.

The method by which the outcome is decided

The lifeline of the modern slot machines is the RNG (Random Number Generator). The moment you turn on the slot machine the RNG start working. It spit out many random numbers ranging between zero to million at the speed of 300-500 in each second. It never stops and is not affected by outside factors. This makes sure that the numbers are completely random.

Slot machines in land based and online casinos follow the same method. When you push the spin button after placing your bet, the machine take some numbers from the RNG, after this it processes these numbers all the way through a complicated computer program. This decides the values of the reels.

It takes just a moment to do this computation, but the games are never programmed in advance to pay back at any predetermined time. This connotes that the chance of hitting the jackpot is same, to winning nothing on every spin.

After a thorough research of the ways by which slot machines find out the values, we provide this illustration as a common idea on the working of slot machines and how the place of the reels are decided and how the payouts take place. We have used the standard 5-line machines as our example.

The way the RNG works

The moment you press "Spin", the machine will grasp the next five figures from the generator and stock them up in its memory. The first number will be used by the machine to decide the arrangement of the foremost reel. Similarly, the second will determine the place of the next reel and this will continue up to the fifth reel.

The computer calculates the position by dividing the number selected randomly by a given value. This value is generally 16, 64, 32 etc, which are common computer values. The way computers mostly operate in powers of two, makes this system work properly. This also makes it easy for a computer to calculate the value. For instance, take the random value as 3,486,421, then suppose the computer divides it with 128. The remainder after dividing the number by 128 will be 81. For every value starting from 0 to 127, the machine consists of set values for stooping the reel. This is because these numbers will be left following the division of the random number. This is what decides the position, where the reel will halt.

Every spot on the reel is assigned with more than a single number as there are generally additional numbers to decide the reel's position. Therefore, if someone wants to change the machine then the numbers assigned to every reel's position have to be changed. The operators can manage the machines only by this way.