There was an episode of the Bungie Podcast which features a math savant, who discussed the importance of math on his work with Bungie Pro, and in the matchmaking engine they built for Reach.
Statistics played a huge part in how the system determined who should host a matchmaking game, as well as inside the predictive algorithms used during matchmaking sessions to reduce lag debt...
Statistics could potentially touch a large portion of a game in some fashion or another :)
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Great post man. Thanks for the input! I'll have to gather some more research and continue my education haa! Possibly get an intern with someone in the gaming field. Ever since I was a kid at 13 watching the development of Halo 2 I've wanted to click the "Apply here" for jobs on Bungie!
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What may also help you is a deep understanding of probability and Bayes Networks. Statistics can be very powerful in their own, but if you can combine statistics with probabilistic reasoning you'll have a killer combo of applicable math skills. Such skills come in handy in developing AI and predictive algorithms, such as the algorithms heavily used in Reach's online experience. Consider throwing a plasma grenade at a tango who's reasonably far away - rather than do collision checks on every update pump ( which is many times per second ), the probability that the grenade will hit is calculated sparsely during its flight in order to reduce the number of state updates to the host and concerned clients ( if I have interpreted what I've read correctly ) This is used in order to reduce lag debt ( and to cause hilarious videos of grenades changing their minds on YouTube ) but is totally powered by probability. Cheers!