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."

Comments

More Like Color Recognition

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:More Like Color Recognition

[cecille]

That's actually a clever idea. The only real problem I can see with it is that real dice are correctly balanced so that every side has an equal chance of coming up (or they are supposed to be - real ones are). Well balanced generic cubes without the dots or with single colour dots are probably pretty hard to find, and probably more expensive given the relative cheapness of generic dice.

Re:What a waste,

[goodmanj]

Wow. Fishing for nerds is so damned easy, they take the bait even when you put a sign on it saying "WARNING: CONTAINS FISHHOOKS".

For a good nerd time, try working out the probability distribution table for Mod8(D6+D6)+1. I suggested it as a joke, but it's less horrible thank you might think.

Re:What's so clever?

[Culture20]

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.

Because if you count 36 dots, was that six dice with six rolled on each, or twelve threes, or ...
Even if you can count exactly how many dice you rolled, was the total of six dots from four dice three ones and a three, or was it one plus two plus two plus one?
I'm guessing that knowing the exact number of dice rolled and what each die rolled is important.