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Dice (the plural of die, from Old French de, from Latin datum "something given or played" ) are small polyhedral objects, usually cubical, used for generating random numbers or other symbols. This makes dice suitable as gambling devices, especially for craps or sic bo, or for use in non-gambling tabletop games.
Traditionally, a die is seldom seen alone, and is rather one of a pair of identical dice that are sized to be comfortably rolled or thrown, together, from a user's hand. Because of this, the singular word "die" is rare, but treating "dice" as interchangeably singular or plural is less common.
A traditional die is a cube (often with corners slightly rounded), marked on each of its six faces with a different number of circular patches or pits called pips. All of these pips have the same appearance within a pair, or larger set of dice, and are sized for ease of recognizing the pattern the pips on one face form. The design as a whole is aimed at each die providing one randomly determined integer, in the range from one to six, with each of those values being equally likely.
More generally, a variety of analogous devices are often described as dice, but necessarily in a context, or with a word or two preceding "die" or "dice", that avoids the assumption that traditional dice are intended. Such specialized dice may have cubical or other polyhedral shapes, with faces marked with various collections of symbols, and be used to produce other random results than one through six. There are also "loaded" or "crooked" dice (especially otherwise traditional ones), meant to produce skewed or even predictable results, for purposes of deception or amusement.
The common dice are small cubes 1 to 2 cm along an edge (16mm being the standard), whose faces are numbered from one to six (usually by patterns of dots called pips). It is traditional to assign pairs of numbers that total seven to opposite faces (it has been since at least classical antiquity); this implies that at one vertex the faces 1, 2 and 3 intersect. It leaves one other abstract design choice: the faces representing 1, 2 and 3 respectively can be placed in either clockwise or counterclockwise order about this vertex.
Dice are thrown to provide random numbers for gambling and other games, and thus are a type of hardware random number generator. The result of a die roll is random in the sense of lacking predictability, not lacking cause. Exactly how dice are thrown determines how they will land according to the laws of classical mechanics. The unpredictability of the result is a demonstration of the chaos theory. However, because the numbers on typical dice are marked with small indentations, slightly more material is removed from the higher numbered faces. This results in a small bias, and they do not provide fair (uniform) random numbers. The bias is reduced somewhat in the Japanese die with its oversized single pip (pictured). Casino dice have markings that are flush with the surface and come very close to providing true uniformly distributed random numbers.
Dice are thrown, singly or in groups, from the hand or from a cup or box designed for the purpose, onto a flat surface. The face of each die that is uppermost when it comes to rest provides the value of the throw. A typical dice game today is craps, wherein two dice are thrown at a time, and wagers are made on the total value of up-facing pips on the two dice. They are also frequently used to randomize allowable moves in board games, usually by deciding the distance through which a piece will move along the board; examples of this are ludo and backgammon. Wikipedia |
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