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Experimental Study of 29 Polyhedral Dice Using Rolling Machine, OpenCV Analysis (markfickett.com)

Posted by timothy on from the roll-roll-again dept.

enFi writes: All dice are slightly unfair; automating 3k rolls x 29 dice allows detailed exploration. For example: GameScience claims their d20s are fairest, and actually has the fairest die in the study. Chessex d20s are consistently mid-range and all favor the same numbers; Wiz Dice d20s are highly variable (some rival GameScience). Shape differences measurable with calipers account for some of the larger observed differences, but not everything. Read the details for graphs, a video of the Arduino-powered rolling machine, and an explanation of using OpenCV to sort die rolls.

(Disclaimer: I'm the author.)

1 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Real nerd news. Reminds me of me. by Kludge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in 1987 I had just purchased my Casio FX-7000G scientific calculator. I read the whole manual, and made program that output a random number 1d20 number and a 1d6 (sword) number with the touch of a button. My fellow D&Ders were reluctant to let me use it for the game, but I assured them, that it was OK. After a few rounds of poor throws, they seemed OK with it. But as the evening went on all my throws were poor. I kept having to run from monsters.
    The next day I made a plot of the numbers from the calculator's uniform random number generator. They were not even close to uniform! The histogram showed many more small numbers than large ones! POS!
    And that is how I discovered a poor RNG in my calculator using D&D.