MShipley88 wrote:Very interesting stuff.So, at what point did you first get into Satanism? Mark
Contrarian wrote:OK, I just want to make sure I'm clear on this: Are you saying you had to actually put numbers on unnumbered polyhedron models?
killjoy32 wrote:NEVER MIND THAT!!! SPY HUNTER!!!! OH WOWZA!one of my all-time fave arcade games. that game was so amazingly cool.Al
sleepyCO wrote:Do you happen to know who invented the 30-side, 50-side, and 100-side dice (I call the latter the "golf ball" because the first 100-side die I had was white with what looked like little dimples (the numbers 1-100).
sleepyCO wrote:Do you happen to know who invented the 30-side, 50-side, and 100-side dice (I call the latter the "golf ball" because the first 100-side die I had was white with what looked like little dimples (the numbers 1-100)
The Collector's Trove wrote:Does anyone have a list or link to the names for all of the polyhedral shapes?You know tetrahedron, isocohedron, etc.
weseld1 wrote:And I also reinked three of these D10s with red, white and blue so they could be used to generate 3-digit uniform random numbers on the range 000-999 (I thought the sequence Red-White-Blue was obvious, but some players never seemed able to remember it!) It was many years later that Lou Zocchi came out with a "true" D10 with only 10 faces.
If you want the low-down on how irregular early polyhedral dice were, get Zocchi's toungue-in-cheek pamphlet "How to Roll Winning Dice". It shows which numbers are most and least likely to come up on the dice from each of the early US suppliers. And you thought "lucky D20's" were only a superstition!
These early "polyhedral solids" sets can be told from the earliest intentional polyhedral dice sets that appeared a little later by the following:--D20 numbered from 1-20, not 0-19 or 0-9 and 0+ to 9+--D4 numbered simply 1-4 in the center of each face, (making the "rolled" number the one not visible). Later D4 are numbered 1-2-3, 2-3-4, 1-2-4 and 1-3-4 around the three edges of each face so the numbers "rolled" are the ones visible on the three bottom edges.
The Collector's Trove wrote:Does anyone have a list or link to the names for all of the polyhedral shapes?
Contrarian wrote:http://www.mathpuzzle.com/Fairdice.htm shows all the shapes that would work as dice.http://hjem.get2net.dk/Klaudius/Dice.htm uses a lot of math I don't understand to explain why those are the only shapes that would work for dice.
weseld1 wrote:The pattern is "simple" - if you know how to count in Greek!A one surfaced solid would be Unihedron (or maybe a Unahedron)
weseld1 wrote:There is a reason that casinos will not accept craps rolls that do not bounce off the far end of the craps table: with practive one can control the dice on short rolls, by holding them with the desired (or the undesired) sides against the palm, and throwing them to not bounce and roll too many times, the odds of the selected side being on top when they stop can be improved. With a lot of practice and a few other tricks, they can be improved right up to virtual certainty. If anyone suggest you play craps, and he first has to get a blanket to throw the dice on, watch out! I have seen that kind of "craps hustler" manipulation used in our kind of games for years, and it works just as well with most ISOHEDRAL dice, as with cubes. The answer for this kind of manipulation (if you really are worried about it) is to require dice to be thrown (1) with a cup, so no special holding is possible and (2) to rebound off a backboard and bounce multiple times. Of course, if you are worried about "craps hustler" die rolling techniques, you have to worry a lot more about rigged or selected lucky/cursed dice. Scarne also explains how EASILY (cubical) dice can be shaved or loaded to make them roll different numbers more often than they should, and how hustlers will use this to give them at least a statistical advantage in their games, even if the dice are not so stunningly loaded as to always roll the same number. "How to Roll Winning Dice" explains this for badly-made ISOHEDRAL dice. But clever manipulation, poor manufacture and intentional shaving or loading can apply to ALL dice shapres equally well, so ISOHEDRAL dice have no real advantage over non-ISOHEDRAL shapes. For anyone who has not seen http://www.mathpuzzle.com/Fairdice.htm I will explain that ISOHEDRAL shapes have all faces identical, and include all the classic, early, polyhedral dice, and would exclude the following dice that you have probably seen: D7 (a "drum" with two pentagonal faces and five rectangular facets around the sides); D5 (another "drum" with two triangular faces and three rectangular faces) and the D2 - otherwise known as the PENNY - which has two large circular faces connected by a very short rim that is essentially impossible to land standing on... All of these non-ISOHEDRAL shapes work just fine for generating uniform random results with a chance of 1/7, 1/5 or 1/2 of a given face coming up. One can also develop a nice D3 by gluing pennies together until the resulting cylinder will land on edge 1/3 of the time, (so heads or tails will share the other 2/3 of the time). The correct number of pennies can be determined by throwing cylinders of different numbers a lot of times - say 10,000 - and accepting the one that averages closest to landing on edge 1/3 of the time. A number of other non-ISOHEDRAL shapes have been evaluated by this method and shown to make perfectly useable fair dice. If Lou lives long enough, they will all eventually appear, but it takes a lot of money to tool up to produce each of them (and he doubts that a fair D20 that just looks different from the current D20 would sell all that well).Now the D7 has the problem of landing with an edge up 5 out of 7 timesso one has to either read the face that is down, or number the edge - this problem is shared with the D5 and also with the D4 and some of the other ISOHEDRAL shapes that are not currently used as dice. I think this makes them poor shapes from a practical point of view, though the makers of the D7 did a nice job of dealing with this problem.
weseld1 wrote:One important question is how to arrange the numbers on a polyhedron to reduce the ability of a "craps huslter" to manipulate them to roll high or low. There is a reason that all classic six-sided dice have 1 and 6, 2 and 5 and 3 and 4 on opposite sides, though only superstition dictates that all are numbered clockwise. (One wargame company did have six-sided dice made that were numbered counter-clockwise. I do not know the reason, but they may have thought they could patent them that way). Lou put in a lot of work to get the numbers on the D24 in the best possible order.
weseld1 wrote:I am rather interested in the 1965 patent application for the five "original" polyhedral dice. Can anyone tell me who made the application? I doubt that anyone was granted the patent, considering how hard it was for Lou to get the D100 patent on a shape the ancient Greeks had not invented.