HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-19) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)
182 points by pavel_lishin
http://www.gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic___________________________________________________________________
tlb - 3 hours ago
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 it's RNG
loses all this, so it's very pleasing to think of playing online
with real dice.
theandrewbailey - 3 hours ago
A few years ago, I found a WebGL physics-based dice
roller.http://a.teall.info/dice/
lanewinfield - 3 hours ago
They should definitely add a fan or compressed air to simulate
blowing on the dice. For accuracy, of course.
JamesNK - 2 hours ago
Premium feature: reserve a set of lucky dice for your roles.
$5/month
BatFastard - 1 hours ago
I assume for critical rolls (edit:roles) you also sacrifice small
animals? Just as effective as talking to the dice!
gsdfg4gsdg - 1 hours ago
It would be cool if the online game showed you the actual photo of
your dice roll.
theophrastus - 1 hours ago
What an impressive device! Does it retain statistics keyed to a
particular die? So that you could possible identify a 'loaded' cube
which sneaked in?
philippnagel - 3 hours ago
The Internet of Things is amazing.
tofflos - 3 hours ago
It's magnificent!
PhasmaFelis - 3 hours ago
> 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.
Forge36 - 2 hours ago
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).I went looking for
a video I recalled about a craps player able to choose what he'd
roll. I didn't fint it but I did find:
https://www.insidescience.org/news/dice-rolls-are-not-comple...
dmurray - 1 hours ago
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.
mml - 2 hours ago
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.[1] similar article about
spotify: https://www.quora.com/Is-Spotifys-Shuffle-feature-truly-
rand...
zackbloom - 3 hours ago
I think you can assume he's in on that joke. The goal of this was
to build a fun machine, not to actually increase entropy.
thiagocsf - 1 hours ago
The fact that he offers to melt and mail a die to any player
who complains of non-randomness is a giveaway he's having fun.
w8rbt - 1 hours ago
This is awesome. Seems you could make it a business and sell some
random bits. Maybe compete with hotbits and random.org.
falcolas - 3 hours ago
Insufficient randomness from random.org?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.
dcookie - 3 hours ago
I think the insufficient "randomness" is explained here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805265
falcolas - 3 hours ago
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.
tgb - 2 hours ago
That's discussing a different dice project - what's the
connection to this one?
misnome - 2 hours ago
The psychological effect of people not "believing" true
randomness is the same.
amelius - 2 hours ago
I think there might even be a chance that there is bias in the
die-recognition system, so random.org would be in fact more
random.
Animats - 3 hours ago
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.[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mejn0n4IslY
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ckwalsh - 2 hours ago
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.
cbanek - 53 minutes ago
> 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.What a time to be alive.
dpark - 2 hours ago
> If you can find out what random numbers are coming up, you
win.So an adversary can breach the system and read the upcoming
results but they can't mutate the results? That seems like an
unlikely scenario.Also the security implications of this are that
some jerk cheats at a board game. Hardly something to lose sleep
over.
Animats - 57 minutes ago
Oh, I thought this was an online gaming system with real money.
Apparently not.
freyfogle - 1 hours ago
> Hardly something to lose sleep over.Easy to write that now,
but let's see how you feel the next time your armies in
Kamchatka are being invaded.
BatFastard - 2 hours ago
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...
b_emery - 2 hours ago
Has it ever been shown that dice not made as you describe are
non-random?
BatFastard - 1 hours ago
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.
cbanek - 1 hours ago
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.
BatFastard - 1 hours ago
The I want to say (counter sunk) dice always have rounded
corners too. I think the cost might outweigh the randomness
benefit for Vegas.
cbanek - 1 hours ago
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. :)
BatFastard - 1 hours ago
Found what I was looking for!Precision Dice.
http://www.bgshop.com/index-backgammon-dice.htmThey seem to
be a backgammon thing.
cbanek - 1 hours ago
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.
KekDemaga - 2 hours ago
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.
BatFastard - 1 hours ago
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.
mostlyskeptical - 1 hours ago
That's how casino dice work right?
BatFastard - 1 hours ago
I think Casino dice just have to be good enough to meet
standards, cost vs benefit. See my Precision Dice post
below.
ansible - 15 minutes ago
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.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHfocxjWbZI
samfriedman - 3 hours ago
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.
dang - 1 hours ago
Discussed in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626092.
rhizome - 1 hours ago
The 10fps potatocam footage made me wonder.