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Netbook-Run Dice Robot Can Rack Up 1.3 Million Rolls a Day
stevel writes "The owner of games site GamesByEmail.com created Dice-O-Matic, 'a machine that can belch a continuous river of dice down a spiraling ramp, then elevate, photograph, process and upload almost a million and a half rolls to the server a day. ... The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has an aluminum frame covered with Plexiglas panels. A 6x4 inch square Plexiglas tube runs vertically up the middle almost the entire height. Inside this tube a bucket elevator carries dice from a hopper at the bottom, past a camera, and tosses them onto a ramp at the top. The ramp spirals down between the tube and the outer walls. The camera and synchronizing disk are near the top, the computer, relay board, elevator motor and power supplies are at the bottom.' While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.) No, it's not running Linux."
While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.)
Yes but there's not a lot of "optical recognition" going on. From the article:
The dice are "Michigan Red Eyes", which have different colored pips for each value. The different colors make it pretty easy to count rolls. For example, if 6 yellow dots are found in the image, there were three 2s rolled, no need to worry about determining the proper grouping or orientation of pips.
If you control the background as being black or shades of grey (which is what it appears on that dirty dirty Windows XP screen) then your task is a lot easier and less error prone. Well done on the designer's part but surely reduces the computational work load.
My work here is dung.
Finally a sensible way to play a 3000 pt Imperial Guard list!
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
What's its AC and THAC0? :)
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
... you can program in what you want the dice to come up with - and get it into a Vegas casino
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Now that we've built a dice-rolling gambling robot, we just need to create a leg-breaking loanshark bookie-bot and we'll be all set to fully automize Vegas!
Why would you need this? And how is this better than a RNG?
No, it's not running Linux.
That's because a Linux user would do it properly. "Windows XP, I see your Dice-O-Matic machine and raise you a /dev/random powered by a noise diode."
"No, it's not running Linux"
I hate it when people to conclusions. Obviously, it is running linux, just with an XP-themed window manager.
Better known as 318230.
It's the only way to be sure that your numbers are actually random.
You could use something that uses clock drift to generate random numbers like VIA Padlock but unless you have taken your processor apart, inspected with an electron microscope and put back together you will never know if its the real deal. Government back-doors, etc.
I wonder how many minutes of kiddy porn one can fit into the ~2 megabits per day generated by this.
From the first picture, all the rolls are 4's, 5's, and 6's! Where's the Yahtzee game that runs off this?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
last half dice roll look like?
Now we can reliably generate a random number between 1 and 6 millions of times a day.
What are they trying to Observe here, Do they think there going to find a magical pattern in rolling dice that can predict future evens :-O Thats it.
I just don't see the application this Robot solves and how anyone or why anyone would fund this but then again maybe it will produce something we can use.
it can only roll D6s.
I believe you'll find that six photos is really all you require in this situation...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
In other new: Computer "used for computer type work" shock!
I mean this is a really neat little hardware project (reminded me a uni hardware project I did), but the bit about the Dell is just fluff. What's so amazing about using a netbook? it's just a small laptop.
If it was being run off a trinary mechanical computer powered by a hamster then *that* would be quite interesting.
Actually, I think I have a new project....
Paul Leader
Very cool device! It does lack in accuracy. Pitted dice are off balance and the 1 will land on the bottom more often than not. That is why Vegas does not use that type of die. There is error in the machine; look closely at the video where the dice get stuck at the top.
"To generate the dice rolls, I have used Math.random, Random.org and other sources, but have always received numerous complaints that the dice are not random enough." Math.random is an LCG and so therefore of dubious quality. Random.org, though, is a true RNG (not a PRNG). If random.org is not random enough, either they're doing something quite horribly wrong or (far more likely) players don't actually understand what random means.
its nice and all to know that it can roll 1.3 million rolls a day, but how is it useful? is it actually being put to use by any gambling sites? if not, why not? if so i think a more interesting stat is how much money does this little machine rake in each day?
heh, I actually linked to the wrong lava lamp random number generator, but after clicking around the site, I decided that this one was better, though no actual lava lamps were harmed in the creation of this rng.
so again: http://www.lavarnd.org/
More music, fewer hits
a digital camera with the lens cap on. Especially, if you can get the raw pixels, it contains a large component of true quantum randomness. Just run the bits into PRNGD (which runs the bits through a secure hash and adjusts the input/output bit rates according to the estimated randomness of the sources) with a conservative estimate of the percentage of quantum randomness.
Nothing is random, but you can still imagine the results of a random event. There is no paradox here.
...Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
That looks pretty fast... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n8LNxGbZbs
I know its a terrible faux pas but i did read the article. So I'll sum it up.
The owner runs a site were people play board games via email. He tried using computer randomizing programs but the customers complained. Some people put more effort into the statistical analysis of the dice roles than they put into there graduate thesis.
So he made a device to role a crap load of dice so customers couldn't complain. but they probably still will.
So yes he tried the usual, easy roots first and the machine does have a purpose.
If I can get my hands on one of these things I can automate the process of rolling all the ones out of my collection of D20's... While an ordinary elimination process might use an average of 400 dice to yield a single die with a 1:8000 chance of rolling another "one" on the next roll, this kind of automation could process thousands of dice in a reasonable amount of time - yielding either a higher volume of dice with a small chance of rolling another one, or producing dice with an even smaller probability of rolling a one...
Bow-ties are cool.
Finally, I can automate my production of D6s/D20s with all the 1's rolled out of them.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
If you build something like this, there's another step needed to get reliably random numbers. Take two successive outputs. If A>B,, output a 1. If A Even radioactive random number generators have to use that step. That was discovered in the 1950s.
If you want good randomness: buy a cheap microcontroller, one thermistor, one photoresistor, hook it all up to the charger of your old cell phone (or power from USB but then there's not much noise) and sample away. Or alternatively just grab that Brownian motion detector.
...ought to be enough for anybody.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Now I can finally realize my dream of a real-time GURPS campaign, where you roll on every single action.
"Okay, I step forward."
"Success. You move one hex."
"I step forward again."
"Success. You move another hex."
"I take another step."
"Oh, critical failure! You actually trip and fall backwards one hex!"
"I'm going to kill the GM."
"Failure. You do no damage."
"No, that wasn't an action, I really am going to come across the table and kill you."
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
I'll make the obvious geek-troll comment: call me when it will automate Dungeons and Dragons for me! Until it can recognize a fistfull of d20's, d12's, d10's, d6's and d4's, I'm not giving him any of my cheetos!
The article mentioned that the dice get beat up pretty bad at the bottom of the machine. I have three questions:
1. how long do the dice last before needing to be pulled out of the machine and replaced?
2. how are damaged dice identified to be removed?
3. does the software recognize when damaged dice are causing errors (for example, when the paint from a pip has been completely chipped off)?
*sigh* back to work...
Awesome.
Some dice vendor should get one made to show at game conventions.
Now finally, we have the technology to experimentally verify the claims made by a certain dice manufacturer!
'nuff said
Your ad here. Ask me how!
On-demand dice roller with multiple numbers of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20. Type in 4d8+1 and see your dice rolled live on streaming video.
there's all this talk of this contraption vs rngs, but when you play an actual boardgame, you use actual dice, and these are actual dice. so in that sense, it is more realistic than rngs. maybe rngs would produce more random numbers, but it's irrelevant. they want what dice would do.
It seems there is a fair amount of waste by the buckets not being full. When the machine started up, the buckets were all packed with dice. Only after they started cycling did you see the gaps. This tells me you could put many more dice in the hopper to ensure a full bucket each trip. If you were okay with the current rate of rolls, you could slow the track down, thereby extending the life of your dice. So long as each bucket was full, you would get the same number of total rolls per day.
Perhaps it's completely deterministic, but we just don't know how to look at it.
Deleted
Gamesbyemail is awesome. I've been playing Axis&Allies on the site for almost 4 years now, and I must say its quite brilliant.
Great gaming engine, and he has covered all the classic games.
Linux doesn't play dice with the internet.
Magic Online generates a lot of complaints about randomness. That's a card game with decks of at least sixty cards built from a pool of thousands of different cards, shuffled, and drawn one by one. The most common complaint is uneven distribution of land cards (about 40% of most decks).
One theory for why people complain is that everybody's brain is wired to notice unusual draws, and when you play online you have far more draws than in paper. A typical rate of play with paper is six games an hour, for two to four hours a week. A typical rate of play online is twelve games an hour, for two to four hours a night. With that larger sample, you see more weird stuff and accumulate more anecdotes about how broken the shuffler is. (You also have someone to blame other than yourself and a global audience for your complaints.)
A new contestant for the World Series of Dice!
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
that the programming required to make this machine worked required at least one random function :-)
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Why not use traditional white dice with black dots on a white background. Then it is as simple as
visgrep <CameraImage.png> <DotImage.pat> -t 10? | wc -l
Calculating the full image is far more work than necessary. This also easily allows for an arbitrary number of dice to be used, assuming the don't start piling on top of each other.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
This guy deserves to be nominated for an Ig Nobel prize in statistics!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You know, for when I need to make that 1.3 million D6 roll for my nuclear bomb attack :)
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Any serious player of ICE's Champions game needs one of these machines.
From the article:
"The data is uploaded to the server via wi-fi in blocks of 1,000 rolls."
Then:
"When the server has enough rolls in the bank to last for a few weeks (I am currently storing a million or so), the conveyor shuts down until needed again. It runs for maybe 1.5 hours total each day."
Somehow get the Wi-Fi blocks then find out where the rolls are being used: ( Online Casino? )
Compare rolls to realtime results and CHEAT the casino! Woo woo!
Yes, I know, It would be hard but not impossible.
Remove the Wi-Fi link is all I am saying.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance." -- Robert R. Coveyou
But I AM a troll you insensitive clod!
An object lesson to the other dice. Bahahah.
... bungie cord holding the Dell Mini-9 in place.
In the YouTube video, did anyone else notice the half dozen or so dice trapped below the top of the conveyor belt, because they got the "exit strategy" wrong? Where do we file a bug report?