
Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009) - pavel_lishin
http://www.gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
======
tlb
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.

~~~
theandrewbailey
A few years ago, I found a WebGL physics-based dice roller.

[http://a.teall.info/dice/](http://a.teall.info/dice/)

~~~
King-Aaron
I just made it throw a few hundred dice in one roll, and chrome promptly
packed it's bags on me

~~~
Majestic121
It works pretty well on my side, but I get stuck dices that never land

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Animats
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mejn0n4IslY)

~~~
dpark
> _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.

~~~
freyfogle
> 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.

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samfriedman
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.

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BatFastard
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...

~~~
ansible
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHfocxjWbZI)

~~~
qq66
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.

~~~
ansible
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.

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PhasmaFelis
> _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.

~~~
zackbloom
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
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.

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falcolas
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
I think the insufficient "randomness" is explained here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805265)

~~~
tgb
That's discussing a different dice project - what's the connection to this
one?

~~~
misnome
The psychological effect of people not "believing" true randomness is the
same.

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saluki
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.

He had a lego dice roller before this.

Amazing site.

Thanks for all the hard work on this.

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w8rbt
This is awesome. Seems you could make it a business and sell some random bits.
Maybe compete with hotbits and random.org.

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gburt
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.

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philippnagel
The Internet of Things is amazing.

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JoeDaDude
If you need a really random number, NIST can provide one free of charge:

[https://beacon.nist.gov/home](https://beacon.nist.gov/home)

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dang
Discussed in 2009:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626092).

~~~
rhizome
The 10fps potatocam footage made me wonder.

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theophrastus
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?

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kevin_thibedeau
It would be interesting to silently switch back to a PRNG for a few months and
see if anyone notices.

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gsdfg4gsdg
It would be cool if the online game showed you the actual photo of your dice
roll.

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tofflos
It's magnificent!

