

Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator - Corrado
http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic

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patio11
Something just warms the cockles of my blackened geeky heart to see that.
Its... tactile? Like the Japanese commuter trains, which run on a accurate-
to-15-seconds schedule that drives one of the world's biggest economies and
has catastrophic consequences for failure.

So are the trains kept in sync with the schedule by their onboard computers or
radio signals from an atomic clock or NTP servers over wireless? No. They are
actually kept in sync by _windable gold clockwork watches_ , which each
conductor keeps with him and places in a special gold clockwork watchholder on
the dashboard of his modern technological marvel.

Its partially for historical reasons and partially for aesthetic
sensibilities, although I know at least one Japanese railroad engineer who
says it is a safety feature. I think that is largely a justification so that
he doesn't have to say "We sync the trains with gold clockwork watches because
we wanted to sync the trains with gold clockwork watches, as trains were meant
to be synced!"

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nod
That is just ridiculous -- and by that I mean ridiculously impressive. Of
course, it may be a step in the wrong direction w/r/t true randomness, both
logically and in the psyches of whining gamers. If someone doesn't trust
random.org (and I have to say, I would have stopped right there), I doubt that
basic image processing where "pips sometimes blur" is going to help calm the
whiners. Kudos for whimsy and throughput, though!

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lallysingh
Favorite part: "As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are
unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine,
melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice.
Tangible revenge. "

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kiwidrew
Wow, just wow. The visual effect of so many dice tumbling down the spiral is
totally worth the Rube Goldberg-esque design; that's something a random number
generator based on thermal noise or cosmic background radiation just couldn't
possibly match! :)

I want to see a probability distribution graph for this behemoth! It would be
very cool (well, in a geeky-cool sort of way) to compare it with various
'strong' crypto RNGs...

