Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by amiheines 2671 days ago
This reminds me of an old post with a dice rolling machine for a gaming site capable of producing 1.3 million dice rolls per day, http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
1 comments

> Currently, GamesByEmail.com uses some 80,000+ die rolls for play in games like Backgammon, Gambit (a RISK clone), W.W.II (an Axis & Allies clone) and others. To generate the die rolls, I have used Math.random, Random.org and other sources, but have always received numerous complaints that the dice are not random enough.

That's a super cool machine, but the justification seems a bit silly. The randomization library in any programming language should be good enough for casual games, and random.org uses atmospheric noise which is almost certainly more random than dice: https://www.random.org/history/

This is to make players happy, not to provide better randomness. Many players will not trust any random data coming from a computer.
As a player, I'd be amused by using radioactivity-generated randomness!

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/