by Dan Moren
How fair are your dice?
We’ve all1 had a sneaking suspicion that maybe our dice just aren’t fair. That natural 1 on that key skill check? Come on. Over at Ars Technica, Sebastian Anthony covers a couple of rigorous ways to check out how unbalanced your dice are:
The die rolling machine is essentially a servo attached to a small ice cream tub, hooked up to an Arduino. The servo fires, the die is rolled, and then the Arduino triggers a camera overhead that takes a photo. Some computer vision software locates the die in the photo and extracts the number on the face of the die. The number is recorded, and then the process begins again, rolling the die hundreds or thousands of times until an adequate sample size has been reached.
Finally, a good way to confirm if your buddy has been microwaving their d20s.
- Yes, all of us. ↩