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I'm sorry, I just have to. :o)  Has anyone considered making
normalized dice?

The problem with truely random dice is that it can make certain games
boring.  For instance:  playing Risk, some of my friends and I have
discovered that we will occasionally get on streaks of really bad
rolling, where we should have little or no resistance to our force,
yet our 30 some armies get devastated by no more than 7 enemy armies.

So, one of my friends, who is a computer scientist came up with the
idea to make dice that biased, not completely altered, but biased the
roll such that there was not equal probability of hitting any number
after the first roll.  Instead there was a weighting towards numbers
which had been rolled less often.

Anyway, making a random number to sort with is not too difficult.
It's the making a weighting system without to heavily or too lightly
biasing the dice that's the problem.  Since this principle doesn't
conform to natural law, there is no predefined formula set that can
be used for this.

So, does anyone see how to do this easily?

- --Brendan

> > I=B9m doing led dies
>
> As someone else suggested a fast-running clock will give you
> random output on the dice. I've seen a couple of electronic
> dice projects in magazines that do it this way. The dice are
> driven 1 - 6 at high speed (no micro, just an oscillator) and it's
> purely chance what number is showing when you push a button
>
> However, you did also ask about external input. I've had to do this
> very recently to generate large random numbers and used white
> noise
>
> http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/joecolquitt/white_noise.html
>
> This little snippet of code may not make a lot of sense out of
> context but what it basically does is to read the timer low byte
> after a random delay (caused by noise transitions on a port pin).
> The timer low byte read after this delay then becomes the random
> number used in the
rest of the code. It appears so far to produce unpredictable
randomness

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