Dice

I am a newbie, and although I have searched the achives, I cannot find an answer to this question. I am playing Twilight Struggle and it seems to me the die is streaky to the point of being mathmatically inaccurate. I know that some would say the same about the ASL module because a twisted dice attachment is offered to replace the original dice. Is this really a problem? And if so, can it be fixed?

Thus spake “rhc9”:

No, it is not really a problem. The standard dice roller uses a random
number generator which scores well on a variety of randomness tests.* The
problem is human perception, not the dice roller. People tend to
dramatically underestimate the probability of hot or cold streaks, and
anyway one game of Twilight Struggle contains too few die rolls to give you
a statistically significant sample.

(Also, the Mersene Twister roller you refer to has been the default VASSAL
roller for quite some time now, at least since 2.9.something.)

To date, I have seen no statistical evidence that there is anything wrong
with the current dice roller, and when assessing randomness, statistical
evidence is the only kind of evidence which counts. If someone can show
me a large sample generated by our dice roller which fails a reliable
battery of statistical tests, I’ll reconsider, but I’m not holding my
breath.

  • I’ve checked this in the past and posted results someplace, possibly the
    vaslmapcabal list or our old Yahoo groups list. Someone who claimed that
    the roller was bad supplied me with a corpus of ASL logs containing
    thousands of die rolls. I extracted these from the logs, and then ran Ent on
    them (formilab.ch/random) and got the results you’d expect from a
    good (non-cryptogrpahic quality) pseudorandom number generator. If you ran
    a tougher battery of test (e.g., DieHarder) on these results, I’m sure that
    you could tell that they came from a pseudorandom source, but the differences
    are going to be miniscule, on the order of a few die rolls over the course of
    your whole gaming lifetime.


J.


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There’s nothing in the VASSAL code that would suggest a problem with the die roller. The die roller in VASSAL uses the same random number generator as many other Java applications and it would surprise me if there was a noticeable problem. If you were really concerned, you could post a saved game log and a stats geek will calculate the probability of the rolls in question (keeping in mind that there are probably thousands of rolls being generated each day).

Just to put this in perspective, the odds of getting the same roll three times in a row in a 1d6 is 2.8%. In a game, that’s probably going to happen a couple of times. The odds of rolling the same value on a 2d6 three times in a row is 1.4%.

  • M.

2009/2/23 rhc9 <messages@forums.vassalengine.org (messages@forums.vassalengine.org)>

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Due to the unending complaints from the players of one particular module, we replaced the standard Java Die Roller with a Mersenne Twister algorithm. We no longer use the ‘standard’ Java random nuumber generator.

B.


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Sorry for this horror vacui reply but… this seems like a serious case of Murphy’s Laws on action… :unamused:
A dice (electronic or real) always goes wrong (vs you)… :stuck_out_tongue:

In fact, I would expect the dice that are provided in most games to fail many trivial randomness tests.

Dice are not perfect cubes and if you took a digital calliper to them, you’ll find huge deviations. In addition, most game dice have hollowed-out pits that favour rolls of 6 because the other side (1) is typically much heavier. My prediction is that the java.util.Random class is better than that. I’d be interested to see evidence to the contrary however.

Here’s an interesting link:

http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_10_26_98.html

  • M.

2009/2/23 Joel Uckelman <uckelman@nomic.net (uckelman@nomic.net)>

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Thus spake Michael Kiefte:

The average d6 roll we were producing when I tested was vanishingly near
to 3.5. I’m sure that every one of the d6s I own is biased due to being
cheap pieces of plastic.


J.


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You mean java.util.Random, or plastic?

Use casino dice – those people are serious about randomness. They don’t have hollowed-out pits and I think they’re precision manufactured with really low tolerances.

But they probably cost $10 a piece.

  • M.

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Thus spake Michael Kiefte:

I mean the MT roller.

Actually, you can get pairs of used craps dice for pretty cheap in casino
gift shops, if I remember correctly.


J.


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I was pointed to an article talking about the problems with common Chessex and Games Workshop dice just yesterday:

dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That% … is+of+Dice

Note the irony that while one would “expect” more 6s, you really get more 1s. :smiley:

Personally, I’ll keep using my standard Chessex/GMT dice. I find the sharp edges of casino dice way too uncomfortable. (Though an apparent 13% discrepancy is higher than I would have thought…)

And neither physical dice nor dice-bots seem to be able to stand up to my ability to make absolutely wacky results come up more often than should be possible. :smiling_imp:

2009/2/24 Rindis <messages@forums.vassalengine.org (messages@forums.vassalengine.org)>

Wacky. 19% 1s is pretty sad.

I like to sharpen my steel dice with a leather belt.

There’s some confirmatory bias here. You don’t notice when the dice are average. You only remember the times when your die-rolls either really suck or are fantastic.

  • M.

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