When I play RISK with my kids, the time invested in each roll of the dice is proportional to what's at stake. During a critical close battle, they might shake, blow, and otherwise cajole the the dice for a minute before rolling. Playing on an iPad with its RNG loses all this, so it's very pleasing to think of playing online with real dice.
Cute mechanism, but only running it part time and storing random numbers for later use is asking for a security breach. If you can find out what random numbers are coming up, you win.
Vibratory bowl feeders pretty solve the problem of getting simple objects lined up.[1] Any object that isn't lined up properly gets dropped off the ramps back into the bowl for another try.
Agreed, but it sounds like this project was for fun and to make users happy, not to actually guarantee true randomness.
I would wager the amount of wear on the dice, and small flaws in each individual die, produce a non negligible bias to the rolls that could be avoided by using cryptographicly secure random sources.
If they start using these dice to generate cryptographic keys, I'll run for the hills, but so long as they are only used for playing board games over the internet, this is really cool.
> If they start using these dice to generate cryptographic keys, I'll run for the hills, but so long as they are only used for playing board games over the internet, this is really cool.
This just gave me a flashback to making cryptographic keys long ago, and adding in entropy by typing randomly on the keyboard.
Spoilers: he doesn't actually use the output of the machine to power his site. Not that he couldn't...
This pops up on HN or reddit every 3 or 4 years. I want to say he made it in early 2000s? I was in the cube next to him at the time... my only brush with greatness.
This is great. Reminds me of the Lego brick identifier/sorter that was posted a while ago. Sure, there's no real reason that true-random bits from Random.org couldn't be used, but I think a project like this is neat precisely because it takes such great strides to bring back a classic physical component of playing board games that the service is otherwise designed to eliminate.
A wonderful machine, I can imagine the sound of it two rooms away.
So now as an engineer and semi-pro backgammon player, the ultimate dice were ones that had the divots drill out and replaced with a different colored plastic. This way the uneven weight of the dice was not a factor. Just wondering...
Can't be nearly as bad as any pachinko parlor that I've been near. It sounds like a machine shop full of circular saws.
I harbor the belief (likely unjustified) that the hearing loss resulting in hanging out there is as bad as gambling addiction issues. I don't know how people stand it, or why they'd want to.
The bright lights and noise levels in casinos are deliberate as they impair rational thought. Study after study on "cognitive load" show that if your brain is being stimulated or worked in one domain it impairs good decision making in other domains.
I'm sure the operators of these places are aware of that too.
What's funny is that with USA casinos, the noise level is loud, but not bothersome to me personally. AFAIK, this is intended to create a "lively" atmosphere.
Whereas the pachinko parlors are far beyond the "lively" level, and well into the "where is my OSHA-approved hearing protection?" level.
If the divots are a different color plastic then they have a different weight than the rest of the die as they contain different amounts of carbon black, camel white etc.
True, but that difference is insignificant compared to no material at all. Plus if you were REALLY anal, things could be done to exactly match the density.
The manufacturers represented them as less biases. I do not have any statistics to back it up.
But it does make sense that the removal of any material would effect the rolling unless very sophisticated things were done to offset the remove of material.
Really? I've never heard of this, and I live in Vegas where fair dice are considered pretty important.
The pips on opposing sides always add up to 7, and each of the faces are balanced (1 is in the center, 2 is on opposing corners, 3 is a line, 4 is all the corners, and 5 is the corners and the center, 6 is two rows).
At least in craps, what the casinos worry about are fake dice, and not hitting the back wall with the dice. The back bumpy wall introduces a lot of randomness. Some people try to put the dice in various initial positions and roll them so that they only roll over one axis, to try to influence the rolls. The casino will throw you out if you don't hit the back wall repeatedly.
Also, over time the sharp corners of the dice get ground down just by friction. Uneven wear is also a problem, which is why they frequently switch out the dice.
Ah thanks, very interesting. This part was telling:
"Precision dice with rounded (or cut) corners are recommended where a limited rolling area is available, the cut corners allow the dice to tumble, in particular the smallest size of 1/2 inch (13 mm) are becoming increasingly used by many RPG gamers."
I didn't think about backgammon being a small dice rolling area, but that makes total sense.
Probably. Even the extra security features probably make them cost a lot more than cheap dice, and there's a lot more QA like spinning them on various axes to make sure they are balanced.
They make up a bit of that on the backend though, selling the dice to all the tourists. :)
> I have used Math.random, Random.org and other sources, but have always received numerous complaints that the dice are not random enough. Some players have put more effort into statistical analysis of the rolls than they put into their doctoral dissertation.
I seriously doubt that high-quality electronic randomness is non-random enough to have a noticeable effect on the outcome of board games. It's nice that the guy is accommodating enough to go to all this effort, but it seems unnecessary. Cool project, though.
humans have an odd relationship with randomness. iTunes had to de-randomize their shuffle system, because it was too random (i.e. you could get the same song back to back etc, purely randomly). We tend to see patterns that just aren't there. I'm not surprised his player complained.
A similar story I recall was that shuffling a deck (by hand) vs randomly sorting cards. It's more likely that the values were TOO random and resulted in a less enjoyable experience (or the player wanted to blame someone other than themselves).
Bridge is particularly prone to being affected by poor shuffling, for two reasons. Firstly, cards of the same suit are clumped together as part of each trick, and if they are not separated during the shuffle, get evenly distributed back to the players. Secondly, suit distribution is important in bridge - it's normal to describe a hand by the amount of each suit it has.
Players noticed that voids and singletons were more common when playing online or with computer-generated hands. Unlike the board gamers of the article and everyone else who complains about bad RNGs, they had noticed a real effect, but the effect was backwards - the computer hands were better shuffled and more random.
Odd. Seems like the only way it wouldn't be random is if the code transforming the output into die rolls was wrong, or if the inherent unfairness of dice with pips carved out of them is truly desired (which, it seems, could still be modeled from a truly random source).
A cool machine though. I was expecting the captures to take place somewhere other than the lifting chain though, but it makes sense for the setup.
You're probably right, it's probably more of a psychological issue than an issue of randomness. Perhaps his users simply trust dice more than they do "atmospheric noise with a certification of randomness across sliding windows", even though minor imperfections in dice (and dug-out pips are more than minor imperfections) will cause them to be much less fair.
That said, it would be really interesting to see the referenced thesis-like papers. Or use high quality Vegas dice for awhile and compare the outcome of those to the purely random data.
I've been playing on gamesbyemail.com for over 12 years. It's amazing what Scott implemented early on in the AJAX era. I mainly play WW2 the Axis & Allies game. Amazing job. Great fun.
How could rolling dice be "more random" by any meaningful definition of randomness than random.org? Rolling dice is a pretty trivial physics problem with really hard to observe parameters... parameters that the machine reduces the dimensionality of considerably.
