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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."
Because any developer worth their weight in salt will tell you that RNGs are not truly random.
From TFA:
"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. Some players have put more effort into statistical analysis of the rolls than they put into their doctoral dissertation."
So, basically it was to quiet complaints about the randomness of the computer generated dice rolls. I question whether it's really better, but the players think it's better and in this context I guess that's all that matters.
And yet, there is probably some bias in the way that the dice are thrown. This project is cool, but as a source of random numbers it is quite silly.
If this does not qualify as random, what does?
A dicerolling machine external to and slightly more complex than the universe itself?
I normally don't mind the arguments or objections that this or that is psuedo-random rather than truly random, especially when it comes to computer generated numbers designed to do X or Y.
But really these are physical dice. If this doesn't cut it for you, what will?
In the "good old days," we called that a clever hack. Solving a problem is about simplifying the problem space in any and every way possible. I've made similar "OCR" hacks when everything was going to be in a known font and size.