Collaborate Disseminate
Dice are about the simplest machines possible, and they’ve been used since before recorded history to generate random numbers. But no machine is so simple that a little needless complexity …read more Continue reading Spinning Magnets Do Your Dice Rolling for You
There’s an old joke about how can you find the height of a building using a barometer. One of the punchlines is to drop the barometer from the roof and …read more Continue reading Weird Things To Do With FPGAs
Hackers love random numbers, or more accurately, the pursuit of them. It turns out that computers are so good at following our exacting instructions that they are largely incapable of …read more Continue reading Random Number Generator is a Blast from the Past
When you have a bunch of people gathered around a table for a “Dungeons & Dragons” session, you have to expect that things are not always going to go smoothly. …read more Continue reading Roll the Radioactive Dice for Truly Random D&D Play
For the price of a toothbrush and a small motor with an offset weight, a bristlebot is essentially the cheapest robot that can be built. The motor shakes the toothbrush …read more Continue reading Random Robot Makes Random Art
It does sound a bit silly — the idea that given enough time, a plant could influence the order of hardware-generated random numbers in order to get enough light to survive. But not so silly that [DeckerM] couldn’t wait to …read more
Continue reading Can Plants Bend Light to Their Self-Preserving Will?
Are you running out of ways to entertain yourself and your family? If you’ve read all the books and watched all the movies, it might be time to explore the psychic abilities of silicon. [Hari Wiguna] has just the trick to keep them guessing for a good long time.
This …read more
Minecraft is a game about exploring procedure-generated worlds. Each world is generated from a particular “seed” value, and sharing this seed value allows others to generate the same world in their own game. Recently, the distributed computing project Minecraft@Home set about trying to find the seed value of the world …read more
Continue reading Finding The Random Seed of Minecraft’s Title Screen
Randomness is a pursuit in a similar vein to metrology or time and frequency, in that inordinate quantities of effort can be expended in pursuit of its purest form. The Holy Grail is a source of completely unpredictable randomness, and the search for entropy so pure has taken experimenters into …read more
For the casual Monopoly or Risk player, using plain six-sided dice is probably fine. For other games you may need dice with much more than six sides, and if you really want to go overboard you can do what [John] did and build electronic dice with a random number generator …read more