Do Dice Work?
Behind the Scenes
Rough Script & Storyboard
I don’t think you realize how unbalanced dice really are. Apparently like 90% of dice that you use every day (you use dice every day right) are completely out of whack thus giving you a not truly random experience. At least, that’s what they say, but how can a tool that has found such favor with humanity have such a critical flaw.
2 die on a scale, tilting.
Everyday, show board of boardgames/dnd/etc
Whack, Bounce around room till it knocks out person in middle.
Flawed, talking head
Turns out physics doesn’t care what humans want. But physics doesn’t care about our feelings. As such the most commonly recited reasoning of unbalanced dice is due to the uneven weight of the dice themselves. And physics knows that if an object is unevenly weighted, it is favored to land on it’s heavier side. Gravity doesn’t play favourites, in a vacuum things fall at an even rate, but when you consider things like air resistance, heavier things fall faster, and if the structure of the object allows, will fall flat on it’s ass. You would assume that when dice, there is a 1 of out 6 chance of getting any particular result. That should get you thinking, do dice have a heavier side? Well, you see these dots, they are called Pips, which is a general term used to count tiny things. And each pip removes some weight from the dice making it unevenly weighted. And if you consider which side has the most and least weight removed, you’ll notice that 6 face has the most pips, making it lighter than the 1 face which only has 1 pip. Which means, excluding external factors, 6 is the expected result of any given dice roll. So when you roll doubles, getting Boxcars or Midnight are the most likely result while Snake eyes is the least likely.
Now what if you doubled down on this insight by applying more weight to the heavier side of the die, by I dunno, say blowing on the dice? We all know that blowing on the dice is superstitious gambling behavior that doesn’t make a difference to the outcome, but would the moisture from your breath cause the die to be heavier on 1 side thus landing on the side you blew on? With that assumption, if you wanted to roll a 6, you would blow on the 1 face of the die. Why? Because dice follow a standard that the opposite sides of a die must add up to 7.
If you want to rig a dice even further, you can bake it a little bit. Yes, like bake it in the oven. Place a die on a baking tray with the number you want it to roll facing upwards. Then after baking it ever so briefly, the plastic will melt towards the bottom, causing the dice weight to shift downwards without it being visibly noticeable. Please be careful doing this and look up a proper guide so you’re not inhaling plastic fumes. Also please don’t do anything stupid or immoral with rigged dice.
Now because I know a bunch of people just paused the video to go rig dice, here is how to defend against it, here is a way to test if a dice is unevenly weighted. Grab a glass and fill it with a third of a cup of water. Then add 2-3 tablespoons of salt and mix. Depending on how heavy your dice are, you may need to add more salt. Now you can experiment with different dice and see which side faces upward. Just flick the dice as many times as you want to test and pay attention to which numbers show up more frequently, those are the favored results. You’ll find that clear dice are usually the most fair because the material used is spread equally throughout. Meanwhile opaque and mixed material are more unevenly spread and tend to heavily favor certain outcomes.
Warning, I was hesitant to include this next bit but here is a simple way to both test the influence of weight AND rig some dice at home.
Demonstration with salt water / oven
But let’s be real for a second, although the above should be true, there are so many other variables to consider that would outweigh (weight pun counter) the miniscule weight differences of pips and moisture. Aside from external factors, one major issue is how the dice themselves are made. Some dice are manufactured without any concern about how fair the dic
If you’re still not convinced about the real world consequences of uneven dice, then consider the law of large numbers. If you roll dice a handful (pun) of times, you are not going to notice any particular favorability. But if the number of dice rolls get into the millions, like say a Casino might experience, then these seemingly slight imbalances can change your fortune.
Casino’s are very aware of this, and have taken great precautions to make their dice as evenly weighted as possible. Most casinos even hand craft their dice to create as much variety as possible through human error, which sounds silly, you would think that they would have a machine do it, but no dice because a machine doing it would cause a consistent error. The variable error is much more fair when it comes to gambling. Although it doesn’t sound impressive to say that they are handcrafted, casino dice are called precision dice for a reason, the quality assurance check doesn’t allow for errors exceeding 0.0005 of an inch. Not only that, but when they drill out the pips, they refill them with the same material as the dice itself so that the dice return to their normal mass. They are also made translucent, so that there is no way to hide if the dice are loaded or crooked and are even stamped with a serial number to avoid any sleight of hand shenanigans.
But.. not every dice game is played at a casino. Take Catan for example, the dice that come with the game have the pips carved out, making it more likely to roll a 6 thus giving the 8-12 placements a slight advantage over the 2-6 placements. But then why isn’t everyone rushing to the 12 spot? It comes back to the law of large numbers coupled with the miniscule effect of the unevenness of the dice. Not to mention things like surface friction, bounce, air resistance, and the force and rotation of the throw. These all have much more influence than the slight difference in weight distribution and so you can hardly tell the difference with modern day dice.
But these are modern day casinos. Back in the day, dice were very far from being evenly weighted. Older dice didn't have the benefit of modern technology and were severely misshapen. In fact the earliest dice were first made with the ankle bones of animals like sheep. You’ve probably heard the words Bone dice or knucklebones. They are based on historical fact. These dice were frequently used for fortune-telling and even used to predict the future. Not just casually, but for major decision-making throughout history. A roll of the dice could decide how civilizations reacted to things like wars, famine and even birthright. It wasn’t until the 16th century that the concepts of randomness and probability were even considered or applied to dice. Up until then it was the act of gods or supernatural forces that dictated the results of a dice roll.
Dice were serious business. To quote Julius Caesar, “Alea iacta est!” which translates to, “The die is cast.” meaning that when the dice are thrown, there is no turning back. “Aleam ludere” was also common language among roman nobility which translates as, “to play at dice.” which the romans did quite often and for quite a bit money.
And the Romans likely learned dice from Egypt, which had a very popular dice game called Senet where you roll dice and move your token that many spaces (3000BC - 200AD). Another old and famous dice game was the Royal Game of Ur. But this doesn’t mean that dice originated in Egypt. There are signs of dice games being played worldwide and invented independently of each other. Scotland played games with Bone Dice as early as 3100BC. (3100BC-2400BC). China has signs of dice play as far back at 5000BC. The historical numbers are a bit all over the place, but the most agreed upon data seems to be that the oldest confirmed dice were found in Turkey in 3000BC. The numbers are all over the place because humans like to stretch the truth, but dice don’t lie.
For example, if you’re watching this, I’m going to roll 3 dice, check to see if it lands on the first letter of your name. The first dice roll group have to subscribe, the second dice roll group have to comment and the third dice roll group have to like the video. If your name didn’t get rolled, well, Alea iacta est.
Since we’re being interactive, time for a pop quiz. Which of these two sets of die is accurate? Well, the answer depends on who is watching. The dice on the left are how dice are typically displayed in Asia, while the dice on the right are the Western standard. The size and shape are also quite different. The exception to this standard are casino dice, which are a different beast altogether as described earlier.
These dice may seem very different at first, but not at all if you compare it to the Disdyakis triacontahedron, which is a 120-sided die. Not to be confused with the now popular 20-sided die from Dungeons & Dragons. But imagine rolling a Disdyakis triacontahedron for D&D? Criticals wouldn’t be very common.
Speaking of which, here are some of the less common, but still used, types of dice. My wife’s favorite is probably the Pentagonal trapezohedron because it looks like the plumbob from the Sims.
There are also a bunch of other weirdly shaped dice that you are less likely to come across but would look really cool in some kind of display case. I bet it would be worth quite a bit of coin especially for any dice collectors out there. It’d be especially cool if the dice were made from the different materials used throughout the ages, like ivory, terracotta, bronze, agate, rock crystal, onyx, jet, alabaster, marble, amber, porcelain, all the way to modern day thermoset plastic or the cellulose acetate used for casino dice. There was even this one incredibly valuable Roman glass gaming die which sold at an auction for $17,925.
Yup you heard right, I can hear some of you say Holy
Craps is the most popular dice game in modern history due to their popularity at casinos, but outside of that, board games take the lead when it comes to dice play. Dice have become a household staple for families worldwide, it’s hard to imagine another tool or game with the same track record.
We even have a National Dice Day on December 4th to celebrate that fact. In fact, if you are a public subscriber to this channel by December 4th, you’ll automatically be entered to win a bunch of game-related stuff, and if you are also on the email list, you’ll be doubly entered giving you better odds. Some of the prizes are through skill based tournaments, and some will be the roll of the die.
We even have a National Dice Day on December 4th to celebrate that fact. And since that holiday is so relevant to this channel, we will celebrate by doing a live game show with games & prizes for subscribers.
I’ll be using real dice for the games because dice roll simulators are actually less random than physical dice rolls because computers are bound to follow an algorithm. Sure, they can come pretty close and be pretty convincing, but the very nature of following lines of code makes it hard to be truly random. Also rolling dice is just way more satisfying.