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Post by: Pouncey
Many years ago, probably during 5th edition, I learned of that scientific study where a Professor effectively proved that GW and Chessex dice are inherently unfair through 36,000 rolls of dice from 4 different brands.
Naturally, I set out to acquire some better dice for my games. I went to a local gaming store to order some dice from a catalog, and I ended up talking to the owner of the store working the counter about the study that led me to his store in the first place. He'd also heard of it, so we talked about it for a bit, and when I tried to buy some of those board game dice that were more fair than GW dice but not as expensive as casino dice, he asked if the dice were for Warhammer 40k. I said yes, because it was the only tabletop game I played of any sort. So he replied to me, something very similar to, "You don't need to buy new dice. If you're playing Warhammer 40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about game balance to need fair dice."
That's a pretty rough situation for your game's balance when people are saying things like that to convince customers not to buy stuff from them.
I didn't even argue or disagree, and immediately picked up 2 sets of Chessex dice off the shelves that looked pretty and bought them, since I like pretty dice.
I have never regretted my decision to buy inherently unfair dice for WH40k that have screwed me over a lot in my games by making my melta weapons roll 1s up to twice as often as they should be, over insisting that my dice be mostly fair when I play WH40k and buying some standard board game dice instead.
Also, that was during 5th edition. Things have gotten a LOT worse since then in terms of game balance.
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Post by: Kaiyanwang
GW is pretty sloppy in general. They sell you everything as a premium, but they cut corners where possible.
Just think about their glue. Call that a glue is borderline criminal.
They have an edge on miniature quality (and even then, the recent concepts are dumber and dumber).
The low rule quality is related. They just exalt a fanboy to rule writer. But the guy is suddenly a Demon Prince from being a Marauder, without passing through Chaos Warrior, Chosen, Exalted Champion, Chaos Lord, and all the experience needed to go through that.
I suspect they pay them peanuts, the rule quality is a big giveaway.
I mean, just look at Chaos books. Rehashed, low quality fluff, few sloppy formations and BAM new book. The original codex is so bad, people cling to that, too.
The biggest issue is the fanboys. You just cannot argue because there is no way to create a critical fanbase, all churned out is bought and "excellent" until the system collapses like happened to WHFB.
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Post by: ZebioLizard2
The low rule quality is related. They just exalt a fanboy to rule writer. But the guy is suddenly a Demon Prince from being a Marauder, without passing through Chaos Warrior, Chosen, Exalted Champion, Chaos Lord, and all the experience needed to go through that.
This isn't new at all really, if the Chaos Gods want you promoted they will promote you. One of my favorite tales of one is of a Noblewoman who managed to bind Greater Daemons to her soul to infuse her life and live longer and Slaanesh promoted her to Daemon Prince by the end as an insult to those Greater Daemons who failed and of her own inner potential.
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Post by: MarsNZ
I think the most damning thing about the state of 40k today is that you can predict the outcome of 80% of games by just looking at the opposing lists.
Second has to be the endless monthly release of books which are largely devoid of anything that hasn't been copy-pasted from elsewhere. Occasionally they'll include a gimmick formation with bonuses that should have been included in the original faction release (Cadian Battle Group is a fine example). GW taking a page out of Apple's playbook with planned obsolescence. Lately the releases are accelerated, which, looking at how the End Times was handled, leads me to believe a lot of these books will be worthless in 6-12 months.
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Post by: malamis
 MarsNZ wrote:I think the most damning thing about the state of 40k today is that you can predict the outcome of 80% of games by just looking at the opposing lists.
Second has to be the endless monthly release of books which are largely devoid of anything that hasn't been copy-pasted from elsewhere. Occasionally they'll include a gimmick formation with bonuses that should have been included in the original faction release (Cadian Battle Group is a fine example). GW taking a page out of Apple's playbook with planned obsolescence. Lately the releases are accelerated, which, looking at how the End Times was handled, leads me to believe a lot of these books will be worthless in 6-12 months.
The problem lies I think with there not being an R&D department so much as 'writers on payroll'. The CBG for example hadn't been invented at the point of the AM codex... because they hadn't realised that formations are A Big Deal when it'd be immediately obvious that free bonuses are worth building armies around, and the better ones worth buying armies for.
On the flip side...
Do you really want to turn your dudesmen into Magic:The Gathering where everything is razor edge balanced against everything else, and the random chance factor is the only possible hope of winning even a slightly unfavorable matchup?
40k can and should be improved, but i'm wary of it turning into something incompatible with the necessary time investment to be rewarding.
As an aside, regarding the dice balance (in the engineering sense) is the complaint that they're innately favoring specific rolls due to their design, or that individual dice favor one result more than others?
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Post by: Fenrir Kitsune
Design Studio is a sales dept for a toy company, a wise man once said.
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Post by: lord_blackfang
The study found that "GW dice" and similar Chessex type dice roll 1s about 26% of the time rather than the expected 16.6%.
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Post by: malamis
 lord_blackfang wrote:The study found that " GW dice" and similar Chessex type dice roll 1s about 26% of the time rather than the expected 16.6%.
I'd honestly expect it to be the inverse, sine the center of gravity is closer to the '1' side in pitted pip dice
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Post by: Pouncey
 Kaiyanwang wrote:GW is pretty sloppy in general. They sell you everything as a premium, but they cut corners where possible.
Just think about their glue. Call that a glue is borderline criminal.
They have an edge on miniature quality (and even then, the recent concepts are dumber and dumber).
The low rule quality is related. They just exalt a fanboy to rule writer. But the guy is suddenly a Demon Prince from being a Marauder, without passing through Chaos Warrior, Chosen, Exalted Champion, Chaos Lord, and all the experience needed to go through that.
I suspect they pay them peanuts, the rule quality is a big giveaway.
I mean, just look at Chaos books. Rehashed, low quality fluff, few sloppy formations and BAM new book. The original codex is so bad, people cling to that, too.
The biggest issue is the fanboys. You just cannot argue because there is no way to create a critical fanbase, all churned out is bought and "excellent" until the system collapses like happened to WHFB.
I've been gone for a while.
Did you guys forget Finecast was a thing for a while? Surely it merited a mention, if only by just stating its name and nothing further, after the mention of "miniature quality".
Automatically Appended Next Post:
 malamis wrote: lord_blackfang wrote:The study found that " GW dice" and similar Chessex type dice roll 1s about 26% of the time rather than the expected 16.6%.
I'd honestly expect it to be the inverse, sine the center of gravity is closer to the '1' side in pitted pip dice
All I know is that I think some of my GW white dice are so badly biased toward 1 when it's the only die being rolled it may as well be loaded, because when I fire meltaguns I always use white dice, and whenever I fire like 5 in a row from different units, very often I miss all 5 with four 1s and one 2. It's gotten to the point where I start asking my opponent, whenever I have to roll a single white die for any reason, if I can include a small handful of what I actually call "ballast dice" of a separate color that have no purpose other than to improve the odds of my single meltagun hitting its target to something reasonable.
I'm a perfectly sane, rational person with pretty much no superstitions and a decent understanding of probability that I understand random results will have streaks and gaps instead of being perfectly even. And the frequency with which I have rolled a single white die and it turned up a 1 is enough to start making a person with a decent understanding of probability and pretty much no superstitions invent a concept of "ballast dice" where you roll extra dice that mean nothing along with the one die that does mean something, under the hypothesis that those extra dice improve the odds of the single die to have a favorable result, and it actually does.
And usually people who want to cheat by manipulating the number of dice they roll with a special way of rolling to improve their odds of a favorable result try to justify rolling one die at a time, not take a situation where they legitimately are only rolling one die since they're firing a squad's only meltagun at a tank, and start including other dice in that roll to improve the odds of the one die that matters having a better result. And the fact it actually works is bizarre!
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Post by: Kaiyanwang
 Pouncey wrote:
I've been gone for a while.
Did you guys forget Finecast was a thing for a while? Surely it merited a mention, if only by just stating its name and nothing further, after the mention of "miniature quality".
Yes, you are right. Is even worse than I want to depict it, and I am far from being a fanboy.
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Post by: master of ordinance
The quality of GW's rules can be compared as to a gilded gak. Yes, it may be covered in gold and shiny bits, but at the end of the day it is still a turd, and when you pick it up you try to handle it you will soon find this fact out.
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Post by: nou
Pouncey wrote:
All I know is that I think some of my GW white dice are so badly biased toward 1 when it's the only die being rolled it may as well be loaded, because when I fire meltaguns I always use white dice, and whenever I fire like 5 in a row from different units, very often I miss all 5 with four 1s and one 2. It's gotten to the point where I start asking my opponent, whenever I have to roll a single white die for any reason, if I can include a small handful of what I actually call "ballast dice" of a separate color that have no purpose other than to improve the odds of my single meltagun hitting its target to something reasonable.
I'm a perfectly sane, rational person with pretty much no superstitions and a decent understanding of probability that I understand random results will have streaks and gaps instead of being perfectly even. And the frequency with which I have rolled a single white die and it turned up a 1 is enough to start making a person with a decent understanding of probability and pretty much no superstitions invent a concept of "ballast dice" where you roll extra dice that mean nothing along with the one die that does mean something, under the hypothesis that those extra dice improve the odds of the single die to have a favorable result, and it actually does.
And usually people who want to cheat by manipulating the number of dice they roll with a special way of rolling to improve their odds of a favorable result try to justify rolling one die at a time, not take a situation where they legitimately are only rolling one die since they're firing a squad's only meltagun at a tank, and start including other dice in that roll to improve the odds of the one die that matters having a better result. And the fact it actually works is bizarre!
Back in a 2nd ed day we used to constantly roll dice during an oponent turn and "sort" dice this way. There were two "schools" of this - some players sorted dice that had most 5 & 6 results on them as "those lucky", but some players chose those with recurring 1 & 2, as "those were bound to result in something higher soon". Both methods had exactly same rate of succes 
If your method could be in fact proven to be a scientific observation, not a mere psychological bias of "remembering succeses due to some rituals", there are some physical and probabilistic phenomena, that could explain such results. Most likely it is a result of a variant of relatively simple paradox of Monty Hall problem: if your white die is in fact loaded, then hitting it with another die after it has settled on it's most probable side with just enough force to flip one side, will alter it's result to one less probable. Or it can be something more elusive, like e.g. a result of resonant feedback between "uneven" dice and the table - the same phenomenon which makes metronomes to synchronize their beating ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8) (this can be falsified if the result of your observation is independent from the surface type of the table (the solid table/cloth/neoprene matt etc). An exaggeration of this would be to throw havily loaded dice on a vibrating drum membrane: with just right vibration all dice would flip up to show the same result)).
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Post by: Pouncey
Pretend this post never existed.
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Post by: Stormonu
Sounds like the spiel from the Gamescience owner, Lou Zocchi. I've spoken to the man personally, on a couple of occasions - listened to his discussion about biased dice (in person) at least twice. He presents a good argument, has a fair amount of proof to back it up, but in the end ...
I don't care. As much dice get thrown about in 40K, the randomness evens out.
But it still stands that the 40K rules are bad. There are plenty of 40K games that are lost or won before the first die - even the first model hit the board.
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Post by: MarsNZ
malamis wrote:
Do you really want to turn your dudesmen into Magic:The Gathering where everything is razor edge balanced against everything else, and the random chance factor is the only possible hope of winning even a slightly unfavorable matchup?
Is that how Chess works? No, skill is a factor that your false equivalence totally ignores.
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Post by: Ratius
Well, what I did was sit down at my dining room table with a single scatter die, closed my eyes, and just started shaking the die in both of my hands, which were closed enough to stop it from bouncing out, but open enough the die was moving around in there a lot. While continuing to do so, I repeated in my mind the term "dead-on" over and over and over, referring to the direct hit marker present on two of six faces. Eventually, at some random moment, I would feel a sudden sense of utter and total peace and calm, and at that moment, I would roll the die without any special hand movement, just the way an ordinary roll would be. And the die ended up with the direct hit symbol up.
Then I did the same thing 14 more times consecutively, and each and every time it would end up with a direct hit symbol up. At this point I considered it proven to myself that I could do it, though the math tells me the odds of 15 consecutive 1 in 3 chances all being the same (3 to the fifteenth power) means the odds of this happening by random chance was 1 in 14,348,907. I know the die was not loaded, as I tested this after those 15 consecutive direct hits by just rolling it a few times normally with no attempt whatsoever to control the results, and it was able to roll scatter symbols.
In my next Warhammer 40k game against friends, I then tried to make use of my ability to make dice roll the way I wanted them to. So I started the process as always, dice in two cupped hands, eyes closed, repeating the number I wanted in my mind. Three seconds into it, I realized they probably knew I was trying to cheat by now, and my anxiety spiked so I just rolled it without waiting for the sense of peace and calm. At that moment I knew it was, at best, a novelty that could never win me any games or money at a casino, because my anxiety would prevent me from being able to do it. And I gave up ever doing it again, never tried it since. Also they don't let you roll dice like that at all in casinos.
How did I learn to do this?
Well, one day I decided to try to see if it was possible to make dice roll the way I wanted them to. So I went and got some of my dice out. And you already read the rest of the story.
The fact you cant replicate the result using your mind powers kinda sums up how much a complete fluke the original test was (if true at all being honest).
Sorry dude, dice are random.
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Post by: carldooley
If you have such a problem with dice, a solution. Bring ten. Your opponent brings ten too. Combine them. Then play your game.
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Post by: jreilly89
 carldooley wrote:If you have such a problem with dice, a solution. Bring ten. Your opponent brings ten too. Combine them. Then play your game.
This. I've never had someone ask, but if anyone accused me of actually cheating, I'd say "Okay, let's use your/my dice only". Then whatever bias the dice have affects both people fairly.
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Post by: carldooley
 jreilly89 wrote: carldooley wrote:If you have such a problem with dice, a solution. Bring ten. Your opponent brings ten too. Combine them. Then play your game.
This. I've never had someone ask, but if anyone accused me of actually cheating, I'd say "Okay, let's use your/my dice only". Then whatever bias the dice have affects both people fairly.
I usually get accused of using loaded dice. My response to such accusations has always been, 'Would you like to use them?' Sorry, just because I like to use pirate dice doesn't mean that I'm cheating.
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Post by: Grimgold
The most damning condemnation of GW's rules is watching battle reports and counting how many rules they get wrong. I don't want to call anyone out but I watched a rather well produced batrep from someone with hundreds of them under their belt, where they made half a dozen goofs with necron and eldar rules. Stuff like thinking destroyers were the wrong unit type, treating ghost arcs as fast, moving around (instead of thru) obstacles with wraiths, warp spiders wounding on toughness instead of initiative, and forgetting morale modifiers in CC. There were probably more eldar errors I missed since I'm not as good with their rules.
These are guys who do this for income, and have probably played hundreds of games, and still can't remember all of the rules. We drastically need to reduce the number of rules in the game, To some manageable amount.
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Post by: MagicJuggler
Personally, I think most special weapons/rules are at least somewhat internally consistent within their own books. Plasma Weapons are generally AP 2 and Gets Hot! Lightning weapons do either Tesla or Haywire but seldom both. For the most part, since esuch weapons are exceptions to the rules, keeping track of them isn't necessarily that mentally taxing.
It's cross-codex that things get sillier. Take acoustic weapons for example. Chaos gets Sonic Blasters, which are basically a cover-ignoring Salvo gun. Eldar get Vibro-weapons, which simply do more damage based on the number of hits. Skitarii get Transonic weapons, which are AP 2 on the second round of a combat. Genestealer Cultists get Seismic Cannons, which use Conversion Beamer-like variable strength and an odd variant of Bladestorm...
Egads!
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Post by: Pouncey
 Ratius wrote:Well, what I did was sit down at my dining room table with a single scatter die, closed my eyes, and just started shaking the die in both of my hands, which were closed enough to stop it from bouncing out, but open enough the die was moving around in there a lot. While continuing to do so, I repeated in my mind the term "dead-on" over and over and over, referring to the direct hit marker present on two of six faces. Eventually, at some random moment, I would feel a sudden sense of utter and total peace and calm, and at that moment, I would roll the die without any special hand movement, just the way an ordinary roll would be. And the die ended up with the direct hit symbol up.
Then I did the same thing 14 more times consecutively, and each and every time it would end up with a direct hit symbol up. At this point I considered it proven to myself that I could do it, though the math tells me the odds of 15 consecutive 1 in 3 chances all being the same (3 to the fifteenth power) means the odds of this happening by random chance was 1 in 14,348,907. I know the die was not loaded, as I tested this after those 15 consecutive direct hits by just rolling it a few times normally with no attempt whatsoever to control the results, and it was able to roll scatter symbols.
In my next Warhammer 40k game against friends, I then tried to make use of my ability to make dice roll the way I wanted them to. So I started the process as always, dice in two cupped hands, eyes closed, repeating the number I wanted in my mind. Three seconds into it, I realized they probably knew I was trying to cheat by now, and my anxiety spiked so I just rolled it without waiting for the sense of peace and calm. At that moment I knew it was, at best, a novelty that could never win me any games or money at a casino, because my anxiety would prevent me from being able to do it. And I gave up ever doing it again, never tried it since. Also they don't let you roll dice like that at all in casinos.
How did I learn to do this?
Well, one day I decided to try to see if it was possible to make dice roll the way I wanted them to. So I went and got some of my dice out. And you already read the rest of the story.
The fact you cant replicate the result using your mind powers kinda sums up how much a complete fluke the original test was (if true at all being honest).
Sorry dude, dice are random.
What makes you think I can't replicate it? I never even tried to replicate it at any point.
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Post by: malamis
MarsNZ wrote: malamis wrote:
Do you really want to turn your dudesmen into Magic:The Gathering where everything is razor edge balanced against everything else, and the random chance factor is the only possible hope of winning even a slightly unfavorable matchup?
Is that how Chess works? No, skill is a factor that your false equivalence totally ignores.
Because Chess is even *remotely* comparable to 40k? You really want to compare a game with mutually identical armies to 40k, when, for example, Eldar can play with the equivalent of a board full of queens?
Hell even in Chess it's been long held that White starts with an advantage which is down to chance or pre-arranged preference.
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Post by: tneva82
Good dice yes. Bad dice while random not even distribution. If it was 100% random every result would be 1/6 times. Bad dices have different distribution.
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Post by: nou
 Grimgold wrote:The most damning condemnation of GW's rules is watching battle reports and counting how many rules they get wrong. I don't want to call anyone out but I watched a rather well produced batrep from someone with hundreds of them under their belt, where they made half a dozen goofs with necron and eldar rules. Stuff like thinking destroyers were the wrong unit type, treating ghost arcs as fast, moving around (instead of thru) obstacles with wraiths, warp spiders wounding on toughness instead of initiative, and forgetting morale modifiers in CC. There were probably more eldar errors I missed since I'm not as good with their rules.
These are guys who do this for income, and have probably played hundreds of games, and still can't remember all of the rules. We drastically need to reduce the number of rules in the game, To some manageable amount.
In this particular case this is not a result of having too many rules, but trying to play every army there is. I really despise watching "three color" ITC battle reports, because those guys don't even remember proper names for units in some cases, let alone rules for them. It takes dozens of games to trully understand, to a point of "muscle memory", how each faction work and it's units interact with each other. Now if you try to play every faction, you will have to literally play non-stop for this level of understanding ever-changing WH40K landscape. This is most obvious after new faction/rules are released - such early battle reports are usually worthless in showing what are the true pros and cons of such faction, because they are played with "default strategy" aplicable to "broad type" of such faction.
Of course, one can opt for return of 3rd ed simplicity and (relative) invariance between factions, but that is personal taste, not an universal desire of community.
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Post by: tneva82
Pouncey wrote:What makes you think I can't replicate it? I never even tried to replicate it at any point.
Well try to replicate it. Multiple times. Report the result. Otherwise your story is just that. A story. Validity is of dubious value.
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Post by: nou
tneva82 wrote:
Good dice yes. Bad dice while random not even distribution. If it was 100% random every result would be 1/6 times. Bad dices have different distribution.
Just to name things properly: non-fair dice are also random. You can have any curve of probability you desire built in random test of any kind. You even utilise such curve distribution in WH40K with 2d6 rolls. Even distribution is just one case of randomness. Only a dice loaded so much, that it always land on one side is not random.
And in this particular case, he was referring to "mental manipulation" of dice roll results, not dice themselves.
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Post by: Pouncey
tneva82 wrote: Pouncey wrote:What makes you think I can't replicate it? I never even tried to replicate it at any point.
Well try to replicate it. Multiple times. Report the result. Otherwise your story is just that. A story. Validity is of dubious value.
Wouldn't you just call me a liar anyways? Automatically Appended Next Post: nou wrote:tneva82 wrote:
Good dice yes. Bad dice while random not even distribution. If it was 100% random every result would be 1/6 times. Bad dices have different distribution.
Just to name things properly: non-fair dice are also random. You can have any curve of probability you desire built in random test of any kind. You even utilise such curve distribution in WH40K with 2d6 rolls. Even distribution is just one case of randomness. Only a dice loaded so much, that it always land on one side is not random.
And in this particular case, he was referring to "mental manipulation" of dice roll results, not dice themselves.
Besides, dice are only random in the sense that the human brain is unable to predict the result, and even casinos force people at Craps tables to roll a particular way so the result is as unpredictable as possible, to prevent people from rolling in a special way to skew the results in their favor.
Even in WH40k, we consider it cheating when people use a special way of rolling to get results in their favor.
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Post by: Xenomancers
I play with tenzi dice. for about 10 bucks you get 40 large dice in 4 different colors. They roll true also.
GW dice roll 4's and 1's at hugely disproportionate rates.
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Post by: ERJAK
MarsNZ wrote: malamis wrote:
Do you really want to turn your dudesmen into Magic:The Gathering where everything is razor edge balanced against everything else, and the random chance factor is the only possible hope of winning even a slightly unfavorable matchup?
Is that how Chess works? No, skill is a factor that your false equivalence totally ignores.
white wins 56% of the time in professional games. The near perfect balance of the rest of the game makes first turn advantage the be all end all
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Post by: Grimgold
tneva82 wrote:
Good dice yes. Bad dice while random not even distribution. If it was 100% random every result would be 1/6 times. Bad dices have different distribution.
That is not how random works, true random is lumpy, if you rolled a die 66 times and got each result 11 times, that would be one of the least statistically probable outcomes. The most likely outcome is that most of the numbers are within +/- 2 from 11. When we do math-hammer we are determining the mean, with the understanding that the results will likely be within a Standard deviation or two of that number (ala a bell curve). If you are interested in determining if your dice are fair here is a stack exchange article on how to do it:
http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/70802/how-can-i-test-whether-a-die-is-fair
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Post by: Xenomancers
ERJAK wrote: MarsNZ wrote: malamis wrote:
Do you really want to turn your dudesmen into Magic:The Gathering where everything is razor edge balanced against everything else, and the random chance factor is the only possible hope of winning even a slightly unfavorable matchup?
Is that how Chess works? No, skill is a factor that your false equivalence totally ignores.
white wins 56% of the time in professional games. The near perfect balance of the rest of the game makes first turn advantage the be all end all
Kinda like 40k except first turn is probably a 65% advantage.
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Post by: malamis
And you can even build armies around yielding the 1st turn advantage.
It's a big part of why DftS has no place in tournament play, obsec hover flyers just win if they go second.
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Post by: Pouncey
Grimgold wrote:tneva82 wrote:
Good dice yes. Bad dice while random not even distribution. If it was 100% random every result would be 1/6 times. Bad dices have different distribution.
That is not how random works, true random is lumpy, if you rolled a die 66 times and got each result 11 times, that would be one of the least statistically probable outcomes. The most likely outcome is that most of the numbers are within +/- 2 from 11. When we do math-hammer we are determining the mean, with the understanding that the results will likely be within a Standard deviation or two of that number (ala a bell curve). If you are interested in determining if your dice are fair here is a stack exchange article on how to do it:
http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/70802/how-can-i-test-whether-a-die-is-fair
I think the point they were making is that if you have a thing with 6 different possible results, the fact that one of those possible results happens 26% of the time over 1,000 rolls doesn't mean that the thing you're doing is any more or less random than if each result happened 16.7% of the time over 1,000 rolls. It just means that the probability of that random result is 26%, not 1 in 6. Full stop.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
Well, what I did was sit down at my dining room table with a single scatter die, closed my eyes, and just started shaking the die in both of my hands, which were closed enough to stop it from bouncing out, but open enough the die was moving around in there a lot. While continuing to do so, I repeated in my mind the term "dead-on" over and over and over, referring to the direct hit marker present on two of six faces. Eventually, at some random moment, I would feel a sudden sense of utter and total peace and calm, and at that moment, I would roll the die without any special hand movement, just the way an ordinary roll would be. And the die ended up with the direct hit symbol up.
Then I did the same thing 14 more times consecutively, and each and every time it would end up with a direct hit symbol up. At this point I considered it proven to myself that I could do it, though the math tells me the odds of 15 consecutive 1 in 3 chances all being the same (3 to the fifteenth power) means the odds of this happening by random chance was 1 in 14,348,907. I know the die was not loaded, as I tested this after those 15 consecutive direct hits by just rolling it a few times normally with no attempt whatsoever to control the results, and it was able to roll scatter symbols.
Is this a joke or do you seriously think you have magical powers?
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Post by: Grimgold
Pouncey wrote:
I think the point they were making is that if you have a thing with 6 different possible results, the fact that one of those possible results happens 26% of the time over 1,000 rolls doesn't mean that the thing you're doing is any more or less random than if each result happened 16.7% of the time over 1,000 rolls. It just means that the probability of that random result is 26%, not 1 in 6. Full stop.
If you roll d6 a thousand times, and a single number comes up 26% of the time, the probability of that die being random/fair is less than 1 in 10,000. So to respond to that statement in an unambiguous manner, a number coming up 26% of the time on a D6 is far less random than a that number coming up 16.7%.
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Post by: Pouncey
 Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
Well, what I did was sit down at my dining room table with a single scatter die, closed my eyes, and just started shaking the die in both of my hands, which were closed enough to stop it from bouncing out, but open enough the die was moving around in there a lot. While continuing to do so, I repeated in my mind the term "dead-on" over and over and over, referring to the direct hit marker present on two of six faces. Eventually, at some random moment, I would feel a sudden sense of utter and total peace and calm, and at that moment, I would roll the die without any special hand movement, just the way an ordinary roll would be. And the die ended up with the direct hit symbol up.
Then I did the same thing 14 more times consecutively, and each and every time it would end up with a direct hit symbol up. At this point I considered it proven to myself that I could do it, though the math tells me the odds of 15 consecutive 1 in 3 chances all being the same (3 to the fifteenth power) means the odds of this happening by random chance was 1 in 14,348,907. I know the die was not loaded, as I tested this after those 15 consecutive direct hits by just rolling it a few times normally with no attempt whatsoever to control the results, and it was able to roll scatter symbols.
Is this a joke or do you seriously think you have magical powers?
No, I don't believe I have magical powers.
The best explanation I can come up with is that somehow my brain calculated what the result would be of me rolling the die and expressed conditions favorable to the result I wanted by creating a sense of peace and calm.
If that's not it, then my explanation is "I don't know how I did that." Automatically Appended Next Post: Grimgold wrote: Pouncey wrote:
I think the point they were making is that if you have a thing with 6 different possible results, the fact that one of those possible results happens 26% of the time over 1,000 rolls doesn't mean that the thing you're doing is any more or less random than if each result happened 16.7% of the time over 1,000 rolls. It just means that the probability of that random result is 26%, not 1 in 6. Full stop.
If you roll d6 a thousand times, and a single number comes up 26% of the time, the probability of that die being random/fair is less than 1 in 10,000. So to respond to that statement in an unambiguous manner, a number coming up 26% of the time on a D6 is far less random than a that number coming up 16.7%.
So you're saying that GW dice aren't really random, but casino dice are random?
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Post by: warhead01
A good friend of min rolls casino dice for 40K. I have no idea if it actually get him averages or not. I on the other hand roll GW little red dice collected from their boxed sets over the last ...20 years.
Which I am told are the absolute worst dice, according to some study using a micrometer I read about a few years back. I have just over 60 of them. They give and they take. And it is for them to know which and when...
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Post by: Grimgold
If GW dice aren't random I don't think any of us would be too surprised, they are cheap plastic dice made by the lowest bidder. Casino dice in las vegas not being random would probably be a felony, so I would assume batches of them are periodically tested, and thus more random than GW dice.
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Post by: Pouncey
Grimgold wrote:If GW dice aren't random I don't think any of us would be too surprised, they are cheap plastic dice made by the lowest bidder. Casino dice in las vegas not being random would probably be a felony, so I would assume batches of them are periodically tested, and thus more random than GW dice.
GW dice are random though.
I mean, if you look at MMORPGs with loot that drops randomly, no one thinks the random number generator controlling dropped loot isn't random when you have different percentages of probability for different pieces of loot. No one looks at the loot table for one of the raid bosses, Garrosh Hellscream:
http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71865/garrosh-hellscream
And thinks it's even weird that his 26 possible pieces of loot he can drop have drop chances ranging from 3% to 39%. No one thinks that the random number generator controlling the drop rate of his loot isn't random because of that.
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Post by: Grimgold
You're conflating two different things, to use the wow example:
Wow loot tables are actually several rolls depending on difficulty and loot settings, but we will simplify it for the sake of argument and say every item that drops is determined by a single loot table with a random number generator creating an integer (IE: whole number) between 1 and 100. The items have ranges that if the random number is within then that's the item that drops. 1-3 is boots of ummie stompin 4-11 is the axe of being large enough to look like you're compensating for something, 12 is ultra rare trinket someone is going to drop a years of DKP on, and etc.
The number generated is random we can't predict it, it can be anything between 1 and 100. The results however are probabilistic, I know that the axe is 8 times more likely to drop than the trinket. This only works when the RNG is random otherwise it will alter the probabilities in undesired ways. If the RNG was 10 times as likely to roll a 12 as an 11, the probability of the trinket dropping goes above the 1% that was intended, and the axe below the 8% that was intended.
40k and games of it's ilk are the same animal as this, probabilistic layers over random number generators called dice. I don't know what number will come up on a single D6 roll but I know that a space marine shooting is twice as likely to hit as to miss (1-2 misses 3-6 hits).
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Post by: nou
But does the question if GW dice not being perfectly random has any in-game meaning at all? You're rolling hundreds dice per game, some of those rolls rely on high results, some on low results (and which of those are for your benefit are reversed when your opponent rolls his dice). So any unfairness of dice used largely counters itself during the game.
In casinos however, outcome of the game rely heavily on single throws, so you have to have perfect dice not to create a bias in favour or against the casino.
If number of different rolls with biased dice has in fact a statistical importance in winning or loosing in 40K, and those chessex-type dice really favour '1' 26% of time, then you should really consider playing low-morale army with a lot of blast weapons, as they will benefit the most from lots of '1' results.
Interesting problem arises if you and your opponent both use different dice, one biased set and one fair. To realy answer if this in fact give you any advantage, you should really measure how important a single die roll in 40K really is (not in a "peak moment", but over large number of battles with varying forces and varying scenarios).
One question about this study mentioned earlier - was this a finding, that every chessex dice favoured '1's or that every dice favoured one of possible results up to 26% bias?
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Post by: Pouncey
Grimgold wrote:You're conflating two different things, to use the wow example:
Wow loot tables are actually several rolls depending on difficulty and loot settings, but we will simplify it for the sake of argument and say every item that drops is determined by a single loot table with a random number generator creating an integer (IE: whole number) between 1 and 100. The items have ranges that if the random number is within then that's the item that drops. 1-3 is boots of ummie stompin 4-11 is the axe of being large enough to look like you're compensating for something, 12 is ultra rare trinket someone is going to drop a years of DKP on, and etc.
The number generated is random we can't predict it, it can be anything between 1 and 100. The results however are probabilistic, I know that the axe is 8 times more likely to drop than the trinket. This only works when the RNG is random otherwise it will alter the probabilities in undesired ways. If the RNG was 10 times as likely to roll a 12 as an 11, the probability of the trinket dropping goes above the 1% that was intended, and the axe below the 8% that was intended.
40k and games of it's ilk are the same animal as this, probabilistic layers over random number generators called dice. I don't know what number will come up on a single D6 roll but I know that a space marine shooting is twice as likely to hit as to miss (1-2 misses 3-6 hits).
Correct.
So just because a 1 statistically comes up 26% of the time on a GW-brand D6 doesn't mean GW dice aren't random. Automatically Appended Next Post: nou wrote:But does the question if GW dice not being perfectly random has any in-game meaning at all? You're rolling hundreds dice per game, some of those rolls rely on high results, some on low results (and which of those are for your benefit are reversed when your opponent rolls his dice). So any unfairness of dice used largely counters itself during the game.
In casinos however, outcome of the game rely heavily on single throws, so you have to have perfect dice not to create a bias in favour or against the casino.
If number of different rolls with biased dice has in fact a statistical importance in winning or loosing in 40K, and those chessex-type dice really favour '1' 26% of time, then you should really consider playing low-morale army with a lot of blast weapons, as they will benefit the most from lots of '1' results.
Interesting problem arises if you and your opponent both use different dice, one biased set and one fair. To realy answer if this in fact give you any advantage, you should really measure how important a single die roll in 40K really is (not in a "peak moment", but over large number of battles with varying forces and varying scenarios).
One question about this study mentioned earlier - was this a finding, that every chessex dice favoured '1's or that every dice favoured one of possible results up to 26% bias?
26% of results being 1 was the average across GW dice. The results for individual dice varied wildly, some rolled 1s lower than 16.7% of the time, others rolled 1s up to, I think it was 32% of the time?
Also, the study involved each die being tested being rolled 1,000 times each. So the question of "Doesn't it average out to even over a large number of rolls?" has already been answered by, "This was already tested over a large number of rolls."
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Post by: Crimson
If the study people have been talking about is the one floating around in the net I've seen, I really don't believe it. Either it was a fluke or there was a systemic error. A lot of people have ran their own tests and come with results that pretty much match the expected random distribution. If ones were really 1.5-2 times more common as they should people would know.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:If the study people have been talking about is the one floating around in the net I've seen, I really don't believe it. Either it was a fluke or there was a systemic error. A lot of people have ran their own tests and come with results that pretty much match the expected random distribution. If ones were really 1.5-2 times more common as they should people would know.
He did that study to put it to the ultimate test whether the claims that already existed about people's GW dice rolling 1s more often than normal were true or not.
People already knew that 1s came up more often than they should. The study was done to show whether that was actually true or not.
And calling it a fluke is not reasonable. It involved a total of tens of thousands of dice rolls to prevent the results from being a fluke.
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Post by: NInjatactiks
Link to this study with thousands of dice rolls? Honestly, the problem with 40k isn't dice, it's the rules. Besides, if dice really were that big of an issue, every tournament should issue standard dice so that everyone is on the same playing field. If you're that worried about dice, just share the same pool so that both you and your opponent have the same chances of drawing "bad" dice. Personally, I think the results are negligible and I have done a dice test myself using chi squared tests. You can view the results here: http://www.miniwargaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1033836#p1033836
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Post by: Unusual Suspect
Pouncey wrote: Crimson wrote:If the study people have been talking about is the one floating around in the net I've seen, I really don't believe it. Either it was a fluke or there was a systemic error. A lot of people have ran their own tests and come with results that pretty much match the expected random distribution. If ones were really 1.5-2 times more common as they should people would know.
He did that study to put it to the ultimate test whether the claims that already existed about people's GW dice rolling 1s more often than normal were true or not.
People already knew that 1s came up more often than they should. The study was done to show whether that was actually true or not.
And calling it a fluke is not reasonable. It involved a total of tens of thousands of dice rolls to prevent the results from being a fluke.
People didn't already "know" that 1s came up more often than they should, people FELT that 1s came up more often than they should - itself not a terribly convincing argument, given the way people psychologically process and interpret past events.
Increasing the dice pool in tests makes it LESS LIKELY that it is a fluke. It does not prevent a fluke, because a fluke by its nature is an unusual event.
Most scientific studies look for a p value of .05 or less, which translates to a 5% or less chance that the results of the study are the unusual but predictable spikes of off-average values, rather than being within the expected range of average values. The general relationship between number of tests and p value is inverse correlation: the higher the number of tests, the lower the p value (and thus the more likely the test's result is reflective of the result expected in reality).
Whether it is reasonable to presume this study is a fluke depends on circumstantial factors, like the results of other tests (and their own P-value) - if the "26%" result only occurred in this study, and every other study resulted in something far closer to the expected 16.7% result if the dice were balanced, then it would be reasonable to presume this study was a fluke (either because the dice were just insanely cold that day, or because the set[s] of dice tested came from a particularly badly balanced batch).
However, if other studies also showed a reasonably strong indication of "1s happen more often" and studies to the contrary were either few in number (i.e. 1 or 2 other studies) or high in p value (i.e. only tested smaller sets of dice, or fewer rolls, or both) or both (i.e. only one study showed the dice were balanced, and he only rolled 10 dice 10 times), then it would be more reasonable to assume that GW dice are skewed towards 1s. Note: not necessarily to the point that you'd expect 26% of results to be 1s, unless that number was also strongly indicated by the other tests, particularly the more rigorous ones).
But that's the thing with probabilities and observing randomness - by their very random nature, your results are skewed. More iterations can get you closer to complete confidence, but they can never truly bridge the gap from Near-complete to complete... there's always a chance to perform better or worse than average.
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Post by: Kojiro
Well I don't know about dice, but the 'worst' condemnation I heard of 40k's rules was an observation by a friend who stated '40k has more pages of errata than Warmachine has rules'. I don't know if that's actually true but he seemed convinced. I've never bothered to check.
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Post by: Pouncey
 NInjatactiks wrote:Link to this study with thousands of dice rolls? Honestly, the problem with 40k isn't dice, it's the rules. Besides, if dice really were that big of an issue, every tournament should issue standard dice so that everyone is on the same playing field. If you're that worried about dice, just share the same pool so that both you and your opponent have the same chances of drawing "bad" dice. Personally, I think the results are negligible and I have done a dice test myself using chi squared tests. You can view the results here: http://www.miniwargaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1033836#p1033836
Here's the article on Dakka, with a link to the original place it was posted.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That%27s_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice
Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Kojiro wrote:Well I don't know about dice, but the 'worst' condemnation I heard of 40k's rules was an observation by a friend who stated ' 40k has more pages of errata than Warmachine has rules'. I don't know if that's actually true but he seemed convinced. I've never bothered to check.
It probably is true. I think if you actually added it up you'd see he was telling the truth.
Please add it up and report here with the numbers you come up with.
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Post by: Crimson
Yeah, that's the one. It concluded that GW dice came up with 29% time as ones. I do not believe this. If ones were almost twice as common as they should we would know. It is absolutely massive imbalance. Either this whole test is bs and it never happened of they somehow royally fethed up.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:Yeah, that's the one. It concluded that GW dice came up with 29% time as ones. I do not believe this. If ones were almost twice as common as they should we would know. It is absolutely massive imbalance. Either this whole test is bs and it never happened of they somehow royally fethed up.
That study started by trying to disprove the myth that GW dice roll 1s way more often than they should. Which was already a thing in 2006, when the study was done. Which was 10 years ago.
We already knew. This just proved it.
The reality is that you are in denial.
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Post by: Crimson
Eh, it is just an article on internet. For all I know it was just made up to sell some expensive 'properly balance' dice.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:Eh, it is just an article on internet. For all I know it was just made up to sell some expensive 'properly balance' dice.
If we discount every article we read on the Internet, I don't think I could even prove your country exists, since everything I know about it, including its existence, comes from stuff I read on the Internet.
If you care to dispute that, please provide me proof that Canada, the country I live in, actually exists, without using anything on the Internet.
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Post by: Crimson
Canada probably exists, there are multiple independent sources citing it's existence (Besides, my SO claims to have visited the place.)
For this dice thing there is this one study. It doesn't seem to be published, peer reviewed or anything. There are no other studies supporting the results.
And frankly, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I'd totally buy a slight imbalance, but the imbalance claimed here is absolutely massive and should be instantly obvious to anyone.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:Canada probably exists, there are multiple independent sources citing it's existence (Besides, my SO claims to have visited the place.)
If I call you a liar, what can you link me to prove its existence that doesn't rely on things available online?
For this dice thing there is this one study. It doesn't seem to be published, peer reviewed or anything. There are no other studies supporting the results.
And frankly, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I'd totally buy a slight imbalance, but the imbalance claimed here is absolutely massive and should be instantly obvious to anyone.
Replication studies are done way less often in science than they should be, because there's zero rewards for confirming someone else's results. You probably believe things and accept them as fact that have had zero supporting studies done to prove the results weren't a fluke.
Also, yes, it was instantly obvious to everyone. We all believed that GW dice were massively imbalanced to the point someone recorded the results of over 170,000 dice rolls to try to prove that belief wrong.
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Post by: Crimson
So, I actually ran a test.
I made 2000 die rolls (a set of ten Chessex six-sided dice rolled 200 times.)
16, 95% of ones. That is pretty much as expected on balanced dice.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:So, I actually ran a test.
I made 2000 die rolls (a set of ten Chessex six-sided dice rolled 200 times.)
16, 95% of ones. That is pretty much as expected on balanced dice.
Did you do so on a shock-proof table? Record each die's results individually? Create plastic barriers to ensure each die could not be mixed up with another? Roll each die 1,000 times each?
What makes your 2,000 rolls of 10 dice override 144,000 rolls of 144 dice?
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
Did you do so on a shock-proof table? Record each die's results individually? Create plastic barriers to ensure each die could not be mixed up with another? Roll each die 1,000 times each?
I rolled them as I would while actually gaming.
What makes your 2,000 rolls of 10 dice override 144,000 rolls of 144 dice?
I know my rolls actually happened.
You're free to conduct your own experiments, just don't use your psychic powers to alter the results. 
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
Did you do so on a shock-proof table? Record each die's results individually? Create plastic barriers to ensure each die could not be mixed up with another? Roll each die 1,000 times each?
I rolled them as I would while actually gaming.
So, no, your results are not scientifically valid.
What makes your 2,000 rolls of 10 dice override 144,000 rolls of 144 dice?
I know my rolls actually happened.
So personal experience trumps empirical evidence unless you can see that empirical evidence with your own eyes?
Isn't that the logic used by Creationists to deny that evolution is a thing?
50012
Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
So personal experience trumps empirical evidence unless you can see that empirical evidence with your own eyes?
This is one non-peer-reviewed study that makes a highly implausible claim. You can find single studies 'proving' all sorts of outlandish gak on the internet.
Isn't that the logic used by Creationists to deny that evolution is a thing?
If evolution would be backed only by one obscure study found on the internet, instead of, you know, hundreds of thousand studies and 150 years of data you might have a point.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
So personal experience trumps empirical evidence unless you can see that empirical evidence with your own eyes?
This is one non-peer-reviewed study that makes a highly implausible claim. You can find single studies 'proving' all sorts of outlandish gak on the internet.
Like, for example, that one study that was never replicated that said it proved that telepathy is a thing that we are capable of creating with technology. Telepathy, that's completely outlandish gak you only see in bad sci-fi that ignores reality, right?
Here's what you see if you type "telepathic rats" into Google right now.
https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=telepathic+rats
Isn't that the logic used by Creationists to deny that evolution is a thing?
If evolution would be backed only by one obscure study found on the internet, instead of, you know, hundreds of thousand studies and 150 years of data you might have a point.
And we're talking about the logic people use to deny evolution, not the amount of evidence backing evolution up.
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Post by: Unusual Suspect
By what mechanic would a shock-proof table change the randomness of a die roll? Why would Crimson need to separate his dice from other types of dice if he's only rolling a single type of dice (Chessex)?
Unless they actually would have a noticeable effect (for the latter, its a meaningless distinction, and I simply can't imagine how the former would modify the probability towards any particular result), I fail to see its relevance in the validity of his results.
Frankly, a non-shock-proof table is probably more rare in real life than whatever table Crimson used - validity in real life may well be in his method's favor, for all we know.
The number of dice rolled would be relevant, but not conclusive. His P value would be higher compared to the study you linked, which just means the other study's results are more likely to be true.
Regarding the Emperical vs Experience...
Empirical evidence only has weight when it is trusted, and AFAIK, the study you linked was never published in a peer-reviewed article, and so its trusthworthiness is limited by its source - the internet. People lie on the internet (though it would be pretty odd to lie on the 'net over something so petty... odd, but frankly not unusual).
That shouldn't be surprising - peer-review publishers are unlikely to be interested in publishing the probability results of a single batch of dice, so the weight given to that study is going to depend on how much you trust the source.
Pouncey, you clearly trust that source... but that's a subjective assessment in this case, and it isn't unreasonable to come to a different conclusion on that.
Evolution vs Creationism is an entirely different ball of wax - there are a bajillion peer-reviewed (aka far more reliably trusted) papers on the subject.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey, so you just blindly accept anything anyone in the internet claims as long as they label it as a study?
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:Pouncey, so you just blindly accept anything anyone in the internet claims as long as they label it as a study?
Why shouldn't I? You're not even willing to call your personal experiment a scientific study at all, and you're expecting to me to take it as valid when you're not offering as much evidence as the other one, where the guy says he phoned up a fairly well-known casino asking them to confirm his results (which they did) and asked a physicist friend for an explanation (which the physicist started out by trying to replicate his results since he thought something was wrong with the study due to his intuition saying that if they were unbalanced like that, 6s should be more likely than 1s, then looked at the physics of dice rolls and basically said the physics were in-line with what was happening in the study because the centrifugal force probably is more important than the mass of the die).
Why do you think casinos use expensive dice that are geometrically perfect instead of cheap, plentiful Chessex dice if the two were just as good as each other?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Unusual Suspect wrote:By what mechanic would a shock-proof table change the randomness of a die roll? Why would Crimson need to separate his dice from other types of dice if he's only rolling a single type of dice (Chessex)?
Unless they actually would have a noticeable effect (for the latter, its a meaningless distinction, and I simply can't imagine how the former would modify the probability towards any particular result), I fail to see its relevance in the validity of his results.
Frankly, a non-shock-proof table is probably more rare in real life than whatever table Crimson used - validity in real life may well be in his method's favor, for all we know.
The number of dice rolled would be relevant, but not conclusive. His P value would be higher compared to the study you linked, which just means the other study's results are more likely to be true.
Regarding the Emperical vs Experience...
Empirical evidence only has weight when it is trusted, and AFAIK, the study you linked was never published in a peer-reviewed article, and so its trusthworthiness is limited by its source - the internet. People lie on the internet (though it would be pretty odd to lie on the 'net over something so petty... odd, but frankly not unusual).
That shouldn't be surprising - peer-review publishers are unlikely to be interested in publishing the probability results of a single batch of dice, so the weight given to that study is going to depend on how much you trust the source.
Pouncey, you clearly trust that source... but that's a subjective assessment in this case, and it isn't unreasonable to come to a different conclusion on that.
Evolution vs Creationism is an entirely different ball of wax - there are a bajillion peer-reviewed (aka far more reliably trusted) papers on the subject.
The Internet. Completely untrustworthy, and also the exact thing we're using to have this conversation right now. Literally everything you have ever read on DakkaDakka is something you read on the Internet.
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Post by: Crimson
The results of the study are pretty incredible and anyone can test themselves whether their dice behave like this test claims (mine certainly don't.)
Furthermore, there is a clear motive for this to be a hoax, the aricle directly links to a store selling 'perfect dice.' (Not saying that this necessarily is a hoax rather just an experiment with some systemic flaw, but that possibility certainly comes to mind.)
Why do you think casinos use expensive dice that are geometrically perfect instead of cheap, plentiful Chessex dice if the two were just as good as each other?
I am sure the casino dice are indeed better balanced. However, a massive systematic imbalance that would favour one specific number that much is highly implausible.
(The cheap dice have air bubbles and other such imbalances, however, such imbalances are random and would not favour the same number on every die.)
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Post by: Unusual Suspect
Pouncey wrote:
The Internet. Completely untrustworthy, and also the exact thing we're using to have this conversation right now. Literally everything you have ever read on DakkaDakka is something you read on the Internet.
Not completely untrustworthy, just mostly untrustworthy. That includes what you read on DakkaDakka, particularly given its status as an anonymous forum where there is no underlying mechanic to distinguish posters who state only what they know and only state those things correctly, and posters who do not.
Frankly, I'm not entirely adverse to believing the study you linked (I'm unconvinced, but leaning slightly towards the study being legitimate - my hangups are the extraordinary nature of the claim and the oddity of someone using their underling's time and efforts to roll dice rather than work on their real projects), I'm just trying to remind you of the undeniable limitations of placing your trust on unreliable sources of information, internet included.
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Post by: Crimson
Oh, and the thread linked to the article is worth checking as well:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/210178.page
Several people noted the possible flaws in the study and posted their own results which contradict the study.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:
The results of the study are pretty incredible and anyone can test themselves whether their dice behave like this test claims (mine certainly don't.)
Furthermore, there is a clear motive for this to be a hoax, the aricle directly links to a store selling 'perfect dice.' (Not saying that this necessarily is a hoax rather just an experiment with some systemic flaw, but that possibility certainly comes to mind.)
Personally, I have GW dice that I am so strongly convinced roll way more 1s than they should that I invented the concept of "ballast dice" because when I roll them one at a time they seem to roll lots of 1s, but when I roll them with a handful of other dice they seem to roll just fine.
Why do you think casinos use expensive dice that are geometrically perfect instead of cheap, plentiful Chessex dice if the two were just as good as each other?
I am sure the casino dice are indeed better balanced. However, a massive systematic imbalance that would favour one specific number that much is highly implausible.
(The cheap dice have air bubbles and other such imbalances, however, such imbalances are random and would not favour the same number on every die.)
Things that are also implausible yet true:
Telepathy is a thing that exists in real life. The scientific community accepts it and the US military believes it strongly enough they're developing strategies for using telepathic rats for military purposes they intend to be using in the near future.
A human being exists who can withstand cold temperatures enough to climb Mt. Everest wearing shorts and sandals and nothing else because he can mentally regulate his own body temperature.
A human being exists who is so naturally perfectly suited for long-distance running that he can keep up a decent pace and never get tired, and proceeds to win any marathon he participates in, including a 30-day period where he runs a marathon each day and wins all of them.
A human being exists who can cut BB pellets in half with a sword when they're fired at him, has done so in a laboratory environment in front of actual scientists, whose explanation for how he can do it is basically, "intuition."
Automatically Appended Next Post:
One of the flaws in the study is that you would never roll dice 1 at a time in an actual game.
You know what I do as a Sisters of Battle player to roll dice 1 at a time? Determine the number of shots my Exorcist gets. Fire my Battle Sisters Squad's only Meltagun at a tank. Roll to see if my Act of Faith goes off or not.
You know, important things like that that happen all the time.
93526
Post by: die toten hosen
So basically you found an article about a study that confirms your dislike of 40K dice and the game in general, thus already supporting your bias to believe this study as fact. though out the thread you not once link to the article you are lauding as the "ultimate indictment of 40k", the poster questioning the article had to go dig it up.
Another guy comes in saying he ran a more or less "real world scenario" throwing dice on the table and letting them fall as the would in an actual game, probably on an actual game table. The response then asks whether he rolled in a VERY controlled environment with a super specific set of rules and regulations. while it's true "scientific testing" should have set goals and be done in a somewhat controlled area, to many restrictions and control can skew your results in a certain direction.
yeah sounds like a pretty easy case of Bias to me.
Also telepathy isn't real, your brain does not "rain man out" while the dice fall while your eyes are closed. you don't have special precognitive dice abilities.
also and addendum, i keep hearing about these GW fanboys that flock to shut dissent and negative chatter down but i never see them on this website or much anyplace else really. Starting to think people here just want a "i hate GW echo chamber" when really the game is pretty fun to play if you aren't already a curmudgeon
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Post by: Pouncey
die toten hosen wrote:So basically you found an article about a study that confirms your dislike of 40K dice and the game in general, thus already supporting your bias to believe this study as fact. though out the thread you not once link to the article you are lauding as the "ultimate indictment of 40k", the poster questioning the article had to go dig it up.
Uhh, I did link to it. Someone asked me to show it to them, I linked it.
Also, the study isn't what I'm referring to in the title. What I'm referring to in the title is what the guy at my local store told me when I was trying to buy new dice because of what I read in the study.
The "Ultimate Condemnation of WH40k's Rules" I talk about in my first post is that a wargaming store owner told me not to buy new dice because, and this is something very close to verbatim,
"If you're playing WH40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about balance to need fair dice."
The only way the study figures into this is that it's the only reason I set out to buy those fair dice in the first place.
Another guy comes in saying he ran a more or less "real world scenario" throwing dice on the table and letting them fall as the would in an actual game, probably on an actual game table. The response then asks whether he rolled in a VERY controlled environment with a super specific set of rules and regulations. while it's true "scientific testing" should have set goals and be done in a somewhat controlled area, to many restrictions and control can skew your results in a certain direction.
yeah sounds like a pretty easy case of Bias to me.
You know, it's possible that both results are actually true. The physics of rolling many dice at once might make the outcome more even than rolling one at a time.
Personally, my concept of ballast dice would require that rolling dice one at a time results in a ton of extra ones, and rolling many dice at once results in a fairly even distribution of results.
And since one of the flaws pointed out with the study is that you'd roll a ton of dice at once, instead of just one, even the critics of the study believe that's true.
Also telepathy isn't real, your brain does not "rain man out" while the dice fall while your eyes are closed. you don't have special precognitive dice abilities.
Type "telepathic rats" into Google right now.
Yes, telepathy is real.
also and addendum, i keep hearing about these GW fanboys that flock to shut dissent and negative chatter down but i never see them on this website or much anyplace else really. Starting to think people here just want a "i hate GW echo chamber" when really the game is pretty fun to play if you aren't already a curmudgeon
You mean apart from the fact I've been alone in this thread arguing with multiple people supporting the idea that GW dice are fair?
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Post by: CrownAxe
"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
93526
Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:So basically you found an article about a study that confirms your dislike of 40K dice and the game in general, thus already supporting your bias to believe this study as fact. though out the thread you not once link to the article you are lauding as the "ultimate indictment of 40k", the poster questioning the article had to go dig it up.
Uhh, I did link to it. Someone asked me to show it to them, I linked it.
Also, the study isn't what I'm referring to in the title. What I'm referring to in the title is what the guy at my local store told me when I was trying to buy new dice because of what I read in the study.
The "Ultimate Condemnation of WH40k's Rules" I talk about in my first post is that a wargaming store owner told me not to buy new dice because, and this is something very close to verbatim,
"If you're playing WH40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about balance to need fair dice."
The only way the study figures into this is that it's the only reason I set out to buy those fair dice in the first place.
Another guy comes in saying he ran a more or less "real world scenario" throwing dice on the table and letting them fall as the would in an actual game, probably on an actual game table. The response then asks whether he rolled in a VERY controlled environment with a super specific set of rules and regulations. while it's true "scientific testing" should have set goals and be done in a somewhat controlled area, to many restrictions and control can skew your results in a certain direction.
yeah sounds like a pretty easy case of Bias to me.
You know, it's possible that both results are actually true. The physics of rolling many dice at once might make the outcome more even than rolling one at a time.
Personally, my concept of ballast dice would require that rolling dice one at a time results in a ton of extra ones, and rolling many dice at once results in a fairly even distribution of results.
And since one of the flaws pointed out with the study is that you'd roll a ton of dice at once, instead of just one, even the critics of the study believe that's true.
Also telepathy isn't real, your brain does not "rain man out" while the dice fall while your eyes are closed. you don't have special precognitive dice abilities.
Type "telepathic rats" into Google right now.
Yes, telepathy is real.
also and addendum, i keep hearing about these GW fanboys that flock to shut dissent and negative chatter down but i never see them on this website or much anyplace else really. Starting to think people here just want a "i hate GW echo chamber" when really the game is pretty fun to play if you aren't already a curmudgeon
You mean apart from the fact I've been alone in this thread arguing with multiple people supporting the idea that GW dice are fair?
Yeah i'm not gonna google telepathic rats.
Im also willing to bet that the people arguing with you aren't doing so because they're "fanboys" but because they just don't agree with the study your supporting OR don't generally care enough.
On the topic of the GW clerk saying "dont buy my product" and bashing his own employer, thats a whole different thing all together. I work at a non affiliated games store that sells GW product and i would have been fired ASAP if i said anything that could possibly deter a customer from buying Let alone was also an insult. IIRC you did end up buying product .
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Post by: Unusual Suspect
The "telepathic" rats are rats fitted with electrodes that directly connect to each other through wires. Rats are "reading each others thoughts" insofar as they correlate a specific neuron-firing pattern with a treat-from-a-lever.
That's not terribly implausible, really - that's barely cutting edge technology. It's very similar to a "thought-controlled" gaming system controller which first associated certain neural patterns with particular abilities, then allowed you to use those abilities if you were able to recreate that neural pattern.
It's also a far cry from what most people think about when it comes to telepathy (particularly the one the Military looked into and eventually abandoned as ineffectual and unreliable), though it may well fit a technical definition of it.
I personally don't have a firm belief on whether GW dice are accurate or not. My issue with your assertion, insofar as I do have an issue, is your understanding of what observing probability entails and the trustworthiness of the sources you rely upon.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
 CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy. Automatically Appended Next Post:
Why not? What are you expecting to find that's so horrible that you're avoiding it?
Im also willing to bet that the people arguing with you aren't doing so because they're "fanboys" but because they just don't agree with the study your supporting OR don't generally care enough.
Meh. GW fanboys aren't something I even brought up.
On the topic of the GW clerk saying "dont buy my product" and bashing his own employer, thats a whole different thing all together. I work at a non affiliated games store that sells GW product and i would have been fired ASAP if i said anything that could possibly deter a customer from buying Let alone was also an insult. IIRC you did end up buying product .
This wasn't a guy at a GW store saying it. I went to an independent store that sells more non- GW stuff than it does GW stuff, because I wasn't looking for GW dice and GW stores only sell GW products. Also I'm pretty sure he was also the owner of the store, not just a desk clerk.
Also, yeah, I bought stuff, but if I'd bought what I came in for I'd've spent more money than I did, since the stuff he was telling me not to buy from him was more expensive than the stuff I bought without any prompt to do so from him. He was expecting that I'd walk out of there without buying anything.
Also, regardless of whether he was the owner or a clerk, some people put the idea of giving the customer the best product for their needs over making the most money possible.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
43778
Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
Your analogy to what was happening there was sending an e-mail to another person.
What are you doing with an e-mail that is not definable as communication? Automatically Appended Next Post: Unusual Suspect wrote:The "telepathic" rats are rats fitted with electrodes that directly connect to each other through wires. Rats are "reading each others thoughts" insofar as they correlate a specific neuron-firing pattern with a treat-from-a-lever.
That's not terribly implausible, really - that's barely cutting edge technology. It's very similar to a "thought-controlled" gaming system controller which first associated certain neural patterns with particular abilities, then allowed you to use those abilities if you were able to recreate that neural pattern.
It's also a far cry from what most people think about when it comes to telepathy (particularly the one the Military looked into and eventually abandoned as ineffectual and unreliable), though it may well fit a technical definition of it.
I personally don't have a firm belief on whether GW dice are accurate or not. My issue with your assertion, insofar as I do have an issue, is your understanding of what observing probability entails and the trustworthiness of the sources you rely upon.
Anyone who ever expected that if you were to create something everyone was calling telepathy using technology in real life, it would prove magic was real, probably didn't care much about the idea of science.
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Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Why not? What are you expecting to find that's so horrible that you're avoiding it?
Im also willing to bet that the people arguing with you aren't doing so because they're "fanboys" but because they just don't agree with the study your supporting OR don't generally care enough.
Meh. GW fanboys aren't something I even brought up.
On the topic of the GW clerk saying "dont buy my product" and bashing his own employer, thats a whole different thing all together. I work at a non affiliated games store that sells GW product and i would have been fired ASAP if i said anything that could possibly deter a customer from buying Let alone was also an insult. IIRC you did end up buying product .
This wasn't a guy at a GW store saying it. I went to an independent store that sells more non- GW stuff than it does GW stuff, because I wasn't looking for GW dice and GW stores only sell GW products. Also I'm pretty sure he was also the owner of the store, not just a desk clerk.
Also, yeah, I bought stuff, but if I'd bought what I came in for I'd've spent more money than I did, since the stuff he was telling me not to buy from him was more expensive than the stuff I bought without any prompt to do so from him. He was expecting that I'd walk out of there without buying anything.
Also, regardless of whether he was the owner or a clerk, some people put the idea of giving the customer the best product for their needs over making the most money possible.
fanboys were brought up in the thread, not directly contributed to you.
Fair enough on the clerk but its not about doing one or the other when it comes to meeting the needs of a customer, its a balance.
The rat "study" didnt prove telepathy, it proved we could remove a wavelength from one rat and artificially put it in another rats head.
Like the other poster said "its like email"
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Post by: Pouncey
die toten hosen wrote:fanboys were brought up in the thread, not directly contributed to you.
Fair enough on the clerk but its not about doing one or the other when it comes to meeting the needs of a customer, its a balance.
The rat "study" didnt prove telepathy, it proved we could remove a wavelength from one rat and artificially put it in another rats head.
Like the other poster said "its like email"
What kind of process were you expecting any sort of scientifically-valid telepathy to involve?
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Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
Your analogy to what was happening there was sending an e-mail to another person.
What are you doing with an e-mail that is not definable as communication?
It's communication, but its not telepathy, which is what you presented it as.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
I think you just misunderstand the concept of telepathy.
Like when the planet panicked over the revelation that the Large Hadron Collider could create black holes, while scientists working on the device were so unconcerned by the possibility they were probably going to be creating black holes that they didn't feel the need to hide that fact from anyone.
Also, the LHC probably has been creating black holes this whole time.
The people who freaked out just misunderstand the concept of black holes.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
Your analogy to what was happening there was sending an e-mail to another person.
What are you doing with an e-mail that is not definable as communication?
These are two separate points i have for why its not telepathy
1) The way the message is sent is no different then an e-mail, it's just the the kind of message is different (it's an electrical signal instead of written word)
2) The rats did not actively attempt to communicate with each other. A piece of technology sent a rat an answer based off of what the other rat did unbeknownst to either rat
Here is an analogy of what basically happened. Student A and Student B are taking a tests each in a separate room. Another person see's what Student A answered, took a note, walked into the other room and gave Student B the note. Whould you say that Student A telepathically communicated with Student B?
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Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:fanboys were brought up in the thread, not directly contributed to you.
Fair enough on the clerk but its not about doing one or the other when it comes to meeting the needs of a customer, its a balance.
The rat "study" didnt prove telepathy, it proved we could remove a wavelength from one rat and artificially put it in another rats head.
Like the other poster said "its like email"
What kind of process were you expecting any sort of scientifically-valid telepathy to involve?
Considering you're making posts and heavily alluding to your ability to influence dice and this study is your proof, i'd really hope it was actual telepathy.
It's not, you're moving the goal posts on your own argument and back peddling.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Pouncey wrote:
I think you just misunderstand the concept of telepathy.
Like when the planet panicked over the revelation that the Large Hadron Collider could create black holes, while scientists working on the device were so unconcerned by the possibility they were probably going to be creating black holes that they didn't feel the need to hide that fact from anyone.
Also, the LHC probably has been creating black holes this whole time.
The people who freaked out just misunderstand the concept of black holes.
This isn't even tangentially related. Black holes are a real thing, the LHC is a real thing, we can test and prove these things exist.
Telepathy does not exist, the rats were not telepathic, the study did not prove telepathy.
again, you're shifting your argument and back peddling.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
Your analogy to what was happening there was sending an e-mail to another person.
What are you doing with an e-mail that is not definable as communication?
These are two separate points i have for why its not telepathy
1) The way the message is sent is no different then an e-mail, it's just the the kind of message is different (it's an electrical signal instead of written word)
2) The rats did not actively attempt to communicate with each other. A piece of technology sent a rat an answer based off of what the other rat did unbeknownst to either rat
Here is an analogy of what basically happened. Student A and Student B are taking a tests each in a separate room. Another person see's what Student A answered, took a note, walked into the other room and gave Student B the note. Whould you say that Student A telepathically communicated with Student B?
No, because the communication there didn't involve any more mind-to-mind communication than one person writing a note and the other person reading it.
So basically the same amount of communication this post uses to convey that previous sentence to you.
If we were having this conversation the same way the thing the rats did happened, by having electrical impulses from each of our brains replicated in the other person's brain, so that this forum was unnecessary and we could just think things to each other, wouldn't you call that telepathy?
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Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
Your analogy to what was happening there was sending an e-mail to another person.
What are you doing with an e-mail that is not definable as communication?
These are two separate points i have for why its not telepathy
1) The way the message is sent is no different then an e-mail, it's just the the kind of message is different (it's an electrical signal instead of written word)
2) The rats did not actively attempt to communicate with each other. A piece of technology sent a rat an answer based off of what the other rat did unbeknownst to either rat
Here is an analogy of what basically happened. Student A and Student B are taking a tests each in a separate room. Another person see's what Student A answered, took a note, walked into the other room and gave Student B the note. Whould you say that Student A telepathically communicated with Student B?
No, because the communication there didn't involve any more mind-to-mind communication than one person writing a note and the other person reading it.
So basically the same amount of communication this post uses to convey that previous sentence to you.
If we were having this conversation the same way the thing the rats did happened, by having electrical impulses from each of our brains replicated in the other person's brain, so that this forum was unnecessary and we could just think things to each other, wouldn't you call that telepathy?
no.
Because it isn't telepathy. It is generally accepted that telepathy is direct mind to mind communication without outside assistance or interference.
NOT: we recorded a brainwave and played it in another rats brain. while pretty interesting on its own, it is not telepathy.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
die toten hosen wrote:Considering you're making posts and heavily alluding to your ability to influence dice and this study is your proof, i'd really hope it was actual telepathy.
It's not, you're moving the goal posts on your own argument and back peddling.
Huh? The one post I made about my apparent ability to influence dice is completely unrelated to the study. I never even said the study was proof of it whatsoever.
This isn't even tangentially related. Black holes are a real thing, the LHC is a real thing, we can test and prove these things exist.
Telepathy does not exist, the rats were not telepathic, the study did not prove telepathy.
again, you're shifting your argument and back peddling.
It's tangentially related because people misunderstand things like black holes in the same way you misunderstand how telepathy would work if it were scientifically proven. I'll give you a hint, real telepathy would not, and does not, involve anything that could be called magic in any sense. You just think it has to because everything you think you know about telepathy that's making you say this thing with the rats isn't telepathy comes from bad sci-fi. Just like how people's misunderstanding of black holes that made the world freak out over the LHC came from bad sci-fi.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:"telepathic rats" isn't proof of telepathy. They took an electrical signal from one rat and replicated it directly into another rat's brain. it's about the same as if I emailed you.
And by doing so, those two rats were able to communicate enough information with each other to solve a problem.
That's mind-to-mind communication.
Also known as telepathy.
They didn't do it consciously. How can you call it communication if they weren't actually aware that that was what was happening?
Your analogy to what was happening there was sending an e-mail to another person.
What are you doing with an e-mail that is not definable as communication?
These are two separate points i have for why its not telepathy
1) The way the message is sent is no different then an e-mail, it's just the the kind of message is different (it's an electrical signal instead of written word)
2) The rats did not actively attempt to communicate with each other. A piece of technology sent a rat an answer based off of what the other rat did unbeknownst to either rat
Here is an analogy of what basically happened. Student A and Student B are taking a tests each in a separate room. Another person see's what Student A answered, took a note, walked into the other room and gave Student B the note. Whould you say that Student A telepathically communicated with Student B?
No, because the communication there didn't involve any more mind-to-mind communication than one person writing a note and the other person reading it.
So basically the same amount of communication this post uses to convey that previous sentence to you.
If we were having this conversation the same way the thing the rats did happened, by having electrical impulses from each of our brains replicated in the other person's brain, so that this forum was unnecessary and we could just think things to each other, wouldn't you call that telepathy?
Nope. It's just hands free emailing
43778
Post by: Pouncey
die toten hosen wrote:no.
Because it isn't telepathy. It is generally accepted that telepathy is direct mind to mind communication without outside assistance or interference.
NOT: we recorded a brainwave and played it in another rats brain. while pretty interesting on its own, it is not telepathy.
Who exactly said it can't involve outside assistance or interference? Where did that idea ever come from?
93526
Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:Considering you're making posts and heavily alluding to your ability to influence dice and this study is your proof, i'd really hope it was actual telepathy.
It's not, you're moving the goal posts on your own argument and back peddling.
Huh? The one post I made about my apparent ability to influence dice is completely unrelated to the study. I never even said the study was proof of it whatsoever.
This isn't even tangentially related. Black holes are a real thing, the LHC is a real thing, we can test and prove these things exist.
Telepathy does not exist, the rats were not telepathic, the study did not prove telepathy.
again, you're shifting your argument and back peddling.
It's tangentially related because people misunderstand things like black holes in the same way you misunderstand how telepathy would work if it were scientifically proven. I'll give you a hint, real telepathy would not, and does not, involve anything that could be called magic in any sense. You just think it has to because everything you think you know about telepathy that's making you say this thing with the rats isn't telepathy comes from bad sci-fi. Just like how people's misunderstanding of black holes that made the world freak out over the LHC came from bad sci-fi.
i haven't brought up magic at all. I haven't brought up telepathy and magic as related in any way, this is you relating the two.
63092
Post by: MarsNZ
malamis wrote: MarsNZ wrote: malamis wrote:
Do you really want to turn your dudesmen into Magic:The Gathering where everything is razor edge balanced against everything else, and the random chance factor is the only possible hope of winning even a slightly unfavorable matchup?
Is that how Chess works? No, skill is a factor that your false equivalence totally ignores.
Because Chess is even *remotely* comparable to 40k? You really want to compare a game with mutually identical armies to 40k, when, for example, Eldar can play with the equivalent of a board full of queens?
Hell even in Chess it's been long held that White starts with an advantage which is down to chance or pre-arranged preference.
Do you realise how completely contradictory your argument is? You said razor edge balance is bad and defended the status quo. Now you're complaining that Eldar are a "board full of queens".
Also yes, Chess is *remotely* comparable to 40k. Both are played on a board with models representing opposing forces. The objective is to defeat the opposing player on said board with said models.
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Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:no.
Because it isn't telepathy. It is generally accepted that telepathy is direct mind to mind communication without outside assistance or interference.
NOT: we recorded a brainwave and played it in another rats brain. while pretty interesting on its own, it is not telepathy.
Who exactly said it can't involve outside assistance or interference? Where did that idea ever come from?
It comes from the overall general opinion of telepathy.
noun
1.
communication between minds by some means other than sensory perception.
the rats in the study were implanted/hooked up to electrodes, seems pretty sensory based to me.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
die toten hosen wrote:i haven't brought up magic at all. I haven't brought up telepathy and magic as related in any way, this is you relating the two.
Okay, then tell me.
How else were you expecting mind-to-mind communication to happen if this thing with the rats cannot be legitimately called telepathy despite scientists and the military calling it exactly that? Automatically Appended Next Post: die toten hosen wrote: Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:no.
Because it isn't telepathy. It is generally accepted that telepathy is direct mind to mind communication without outside assistance or interference.
NOT: we recorded a brainwave and played it in another rats brain. while pretty interesting on its own, it is not telepathy.
Who exactly said it can't involve outside assistance or interference? Where did that idea ever come from?
It comes from the overall general opinion of telepathy.
noun
1.
communication between minds by some means other than sensory perception.
the rats in the study were implanted/hooked up to electrodes, seems pretty sensory based to me.
It's not.
Things that are inarguably types of sensory perception:
-Touch
-Hearing
-Sight
-Taste
-Smell
Other things that are debatable as to being sensory perception or not include things like your sense of balance. There's somewhere between a dozen and fifty things on that list, I forget exactly.
Electrodes replicating one creature's thoughts in another creatures brain is not on the list of things that is even debatable as to whether it's a type of sensory perception or not.
93526
Post by: die toten hosen
Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:i haven't brought up magic at all. I haven't brought up telepathy and magic as related in any way, this is you relating the two.
Okay, then tell me.
How else were you expecting mind-to-mind communication to happen if this thing with the rats cannot be legitimately called telepathy despite scientists and the military calling it exactly that?
Reading the study and interviews with the scientists involved none of them once mention it as "telepathy". Now, i may have missed a word or two, i am human after all, but as far as i can tell the word telepathy was tacked into the study to make it more eye catching and bring more attention to it.
Quote: "These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated direct communication linkage between brains" is not as eye catching a title.
I don't expect unassisted mind to mind communication to happen, never once stated i thought it could happen nor did i say it did happen. Its pure fantasy.
The science they're working on is pretty nifty but it's not telepathy. Automatically Appended Next Post: Alright man, you believe what you want.
you've changed your argument so many times in this thread and said some pretty wild things not grounded in reality.
I am out of here.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
die toten hosen wrote: Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:i haven't brought up magic at all. I haven't brought up telepathy and magic as related in any way, this is you relating the two.
Okay, then tell me.
How else were you expecting mind-to-mind communication to happen if this thing with the rats cannot be legitimately called telepathy despite scientists and the military calling it exactly that?
Reading the study and interviews with the scientists involved none of them once mention it as "telepathy". Now, i may have missed a word or two, i am human after all, but as far as i can tell the word telepathy was tacked into the study to make it more eye catching and bring more attention to it.
Quote: "These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated direct communication linkage between brains" is not as eye catching a title.
I don't expect unassisted mind to mind communication to happen, never once stated i thought it could happen nor did i say it did happen. Its pure fantasy.
The science they're working on is pretty nifty but it's not telepathy.
Here's Popular Mechanics calling it telepathy.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a8686/science-can-now-create-telepathic-rats-15155052/
I think the only reason scientists may not have called it telepathy is that they are much more precise with what they say and telepathy is too vague and sensational a term for scientists who "established a sophisticated direct communication linkage between brains" to use.
The rest of humanity who doesn't have a good understanding of science just call it telepathy for simplicity's sake.
Also, this is the only thread where I have ever encountered anyone who was willing to argue about whether this can be called telepathy or not.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
die toten hosen wrote:Alright man, you believe what you want.
you've changed your argument so many times in this thread and said some pretty wild things not grounded in reality.
I am out of here.
I haven't so much changed my argument as the topic of discussion has flowed naturally into other topics. Which is a normal thing for conversations to do. Do you always have a two and a half day long conversation where you talk about the same thing the whole time?
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Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote: Pouncey wrote:die toten hosen wrote:i haven't brought up magic at all. I haven't brought up telepathy and magic as related in any way, this is you relating the two.
Okay, then tell me.
How else were you expecting mind-to-mind communication to happen if this thing with the rats cannot be legitimately called telepathy despite scientists and the military calling it exactly that?
Reading the study and interviews with the scientists involved none of them once mention it as "telepathy". Now, i may have missed a word or two, i am human after all, but as far as i can tell the word telepathy was tacked into the study to make it more eye catching and bring more attention to it.
Quote: "These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated direct communication linkage between brains" is not as eye catching a title.
I don't expect unassisted mind to mind communication to happen, never once stated i thought it could happen nor did i say it did happen. Its pure fantasy.
The science they're working on is pretty nifty but it's not telepathy.
Here's Popular Mechanics calling it telepathy.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a8686/science-can-now-create-telepathic-rats-15155052/
I think the only reason scientists may not have called it telepathy is that they are much more precise with what they say and telepathy is too vague and sensational a term for scientists who "established a sophisticated direct communication linkage between brains" to use.
The rest of humanity who doesn't have a good understanding of science just call it telepathy for simplicity's sake.
Also, this is the only thread where I have ever encountered anyone who was willing to argue about whether this can be called telepathy or not.
Oh wow Popular Mechanics, an article website full of click bait, called it telepathy? Certainly couldn't be because it would make it a catchier tittle to garner for views (and thus more ad revenue). /sarcasm
Also calling it telepathy just because people don't understand the science is the worse argument ever. That is literally what "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is. You're just calling it magic at this point.
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Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote:Oh wow Popular Mechanics, an article website full of click bait, called it telepathy? Certainly couldn't be because it would make it a catchier tittle to garner for views (and thus more ad revenue). /sarcasm
Also calling it telepathy just because people don't understand the science is the worse argument ever. That is literally what "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is. You're just calling it magic at this point.
I think that's actually the best argument. The people who understand that advanced technology, like you claim to, don't call it telepathy. Those of us who don't understand it call it telepathy because that term seems to describe what we're seeing.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:Oh wow Popular Mechanics, an article website full of click bait, called it telepathy? Certainly couldn't be because it would make it a catchier tittle to garner for views (and thus more ad revenue). /sarcasm Also calling it telepathy just because people don't understand the science is the worse argument ever. That is literally what "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is. You're just calling it magic at this point.
I think that's actually the best argument. The people who understand that advanced technology, like you claim to, don't call it telepathy. Those of us who don't understand it call it telepathy because that term seems to describe what we're seeing.
That's the stupidest thing i've heard. If this is the logic you believe in there is no point in even listening to what you have to say.
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Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:Oh wow Popular Mechanics, an article website full of click bait, called it telepathy? Certainly couldn't be because it would make it a catchier tittle to garner for views (and thus more ad revenue). /sarcasm
Also calling it telepathy just because people don't understand the science is the worse argument ever. That is literally what "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is. You're just calling it magic at this point.
I think that's actually the best argument. The people who understand that advanced technology, like you claim to, don't call it telepathy. Those of us who don't understand it call it telepathy because that term seems to describe what we're seeing.
That's the stupidest thing i've heard. If this is the logic you believe in there is no point in even listening to what you have to say.
Why?
I basically acknowledged that this isn't really telepathy, it just looks like it to those of us who don't understand the science.
Are you not going to even listen to me when I say you're right and I'm wrong, but with different words?
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Post by: Peregrine
Pouncey wrote:I basically acknowledged that this isn't really telepathy, it just looks like it to those of us who don't understand the science.
It doesn't even look like telepathy to people who don't understand the science. Even the most superficial glance at the clickbait article shows that this is nothing more than communication via electronic devices, just like sending someone a text message saying "press the button". If that "looks like telepathy" to you then so does posting messages on this forum.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:Oh wow Popular Mechanics, an article website full of click bait, called it telepathy? Certainly couldn't be because it would make it a catchier tittle to garner for views (and thus more ad revenue). /sarcasm Also calling it telepathy just because people don't understand the science is the worse argument ever. That is literally what "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is. You're just calling it magic at this point.
I think that's actually the best argument. The people who understand that advanced technology, like you claim to, don't call it telepathy. Those of us who don't understand it call it telepathy because that term seems to describe what we're seeing.
That's the stupidest thing i've heard. If this is the logic you believe in there is no point in even listening to what you have to say.
Why? I basically acknowledged that this isn't really telepathy, it just looks like it to those of us who don't understand the science. Are you not going to even listen to me when I say you're right and I'm wrong, but with different words?
The way you wrote it made it sound like you were saying "I'm correct in calling it telepathy because I don't actually understand what is happening" which is a stupid thing to believe
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Post by: Peregrine
Pouncey wrote:Are you not going to even listen to me when I say you're right and I'm wrong, but with different words?
You aren't just using different words, you're trying to defend the idea of calling it "telepathy" at all. Drop the whole "it's reasonable to call it 'telepathy' if you don't understand the science" thing and just admit that you were completely wrong about the whole thing and should never have posted it.
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Post by: Pouncey
The phrase "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" was meant to convey that people who don't understand technology beyond their comprehension would think it was magic. It was meant to convey that that would be true, even for people who were living in the modern era, who embrace science and reject superstition, who were suddenly faced with technology that was doing things that they would ordinarily call magic.
I'm not arguing that it's telepathy anymore. I'm now saying that I'm one of those people who is faced with technology that I would ordinarily call magic, and the fact I don't believe in magic at all apparently doesn't stop me from calling it magic. Which that phrase was created to let us know would happen. Because I realized I was wrong, and when I realize my argument is wrong, I stop making that argument.
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Post by: Peregrine
Pouncey wrote:I'm now saying that I'm one of those people who is faced with technology that I would ordinarily call magic, and the fact I don't believe in magic at all apparently doesn't stop me from calling it magic.
Err, what? There is no technology here that any reasonable person would ordinarily call magic. I have no idea why you're talking about this.
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Post by: Pouncey
 Peregrine wrote: Pouncey wrote:I'm now saying that I'm one of those people who is faced with technology that I would ordinarily call magic, and the fact I don't believe in magic at all apparently doesn't stop me from calling it magic.
Err, what? There is no technology here that any reasonable person would ordinarily call magic. I have no idea why you're talking about this.
Replace the word magic with telepathy.
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Post by: Peregrine
And no reasonable person would look at that and say "this looks like telepathy", just like no reasonable person would look at posting messages on this forum and say "OMG TELEPATHY THEYRE TALKIGN WITH THEIR MINDS". Honestly, why are you continuing to defend this? There is no telepathy, there is nothing that looks even remotely like telepathy, there is only a clickbait headline. At no point is anyone justified in calling anything here "telepathy".
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Post by: koooaei
Replace the word telepathy with potato.
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Post by: Pouncey
Peregrine wrote:
And no reasonable person would look at that and say "this looks like telepathy", just like no reasonable person would look at posting messages on this forum and say "OMG TELEPATHY THEYRE TALKIGN WITH THEIR MINDS". Honestly, why are you continuing to defend this? There is no telepathy, there is nothing that looks even remotely like telepathy, there is only a clickbait headline. At no point is anyone justified in calling anything here "telepathy".
EXACTLY.
Popular Mechanics called it telepathy because most people would read the article and come away from it without calling bullgak about the title calling it telepathy, even though no one involved in the research project called it telepathy at any point.
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Post by: Grimskul
I sense the goalposts being shifted once again...
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Post by: Peregrine
To get back to something more interesting than one person's weird pet theories about the world:
Crimson wrote:I am sure the casino dice are indeed better balanced. However, a massive systematic imbalance that would favour one specific number that much is highly implausible.
(The cheap dice have air bubbles and other such imbalances, however, such imbalances are random and would not favour the same number on every die.)
This is not necessarily true. It's possible that something about the manufacturing process causes distortion/air bubbles/whatever to form in a consistent manner, which would have the bias always favor the same side. For example, maybe the 1 side is at the top of the mold, and any air bubbles that form rise a bit before the plastic cools enough to make their location permanent. It wouldn't be a thing without precedent, cast resin models often have bubbles/mold slip/etc in the same place across multiple casts because that's where that particular mold doesn't work quite right. Automatically Appended Next Post: Pouncey wrote:Popular Mechanics called it telepathy because most people would read the article and come away from it without calling bullgak about the title calling it telepathy, even though no one involved in the research project called it telepathy at any point.
So what does that have to do with all that random stuff you posted about "it's reasonable to call it telepathy if you don't understand the science" or "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? Obviously Popular Mechanics called it telepathy for clickbait reasons, but that doesn't make what you said reasonable.
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Post by: Pouncey
Can you really say the goalposts are being shifted when my new argument is essentially, "It's not telepathy, and I only called it that because to me, it looked like it was because my understanding of science is bad enough that I can't tell the difference."?
I'm basically just explaining why I said the thing that we now both agree is wrong at this point.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Peregrine wrote:So what does that have to do with all that random stuff you posted about "it's reasonable to call it telepathy if you don't understand the science" or "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? Obviously Popular Mechanics called it telepathy for clickbait reasons, but that doesn't make what you said reasonable.
I never said it would be reasonable to do so. I said it would happen anyways despite it not being reasonable. Which is what the quote said. Which is what happened here.
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Post by: Peregrine
Ok, I'm done with this telepathy tangent, it's gone way beyond the point of absurdity. The correct answer here, Pouncey, is to say "I'm sorry, I remembered the article wrong, this has nothing to do with telepathy" and drop the whole thing, not to keep going on about how you had reasons for saying something.
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Post by: Pouncey
Peregrine wrote:Ok, I'm done with this telepathy tangent, it's gone way beyond the point of absurdity. The correct answer here, Pouncey, is to say "I'm sorry, I remembered the article wrong, this has nothing to do with telepathy" and drop the whole thing, not to keep going on about how you had reasons for saying something.
The concept of "remembering the article wrong" would only be true if I actually read the article in full in the first place. Which I didn't.
How about I say, "I'm sorry, I was completely wrong, this has nothing to do with telepathy," and we drop the whole thing?
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Post by: Ratius
Replace the word telepathy with potato.
Did someone call for spuds?
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Post by: Pouncey
Ratius wrote:Replace the word telepathy with potato.
Did someone call for spuds?
Hey, how about we drop that topic and start discussing reasons WH40k's rules are terrible, other than being told that playing WH40k at all means you don't care about balance enough to require fair dice?
Sound good? Get back on track to the thing I talked about in the OP?
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Post by: Ratius
40ks main issues with its rules as Vakathi oft points out is that they took a basic ruleset (probably somewhere around late 4th- early 5th) and have been patching said rules every since.
Placing more and more new rules (flyers/GMCs etc) onto a basic set that causes too much headache and strnage interactions to be useful.
I mean strikedown as a sub rule. Really? Remove it altogether.
Added to that is GWs insistence on randomness (random charts/movement/scatter). It takes away a generals ability to plan adn execute a strategy in favour of "the narrative" or some silly explanation of the fog of war.
Having said that 40k is still quite fun imo. Just needs a good old return t the basics.
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Post by: koooaei
I think it's more a codex issue rather than brb issue. Well, other than psy powers and probably vehicles vs mc (but not so much as magic) it all can be fixed with just point costs.
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Post by: Pouncey
 koooaei wrote:I think it's more a codex issue rather than brb issue. Well, other than psy powers and probably vehicles vs mc (but not so much as magic) it all can be fixed with just point costs.
I remember reading a post from someone who was making a long-term effort to make a better-written version of the 7e BRB by removing the fluffy stuff, not using conversational English for rules, and just rewriting things with shorter, clearer phrasing, with the aim of making the rules clear and concise, without actually changing any rules to the point where the game would play any differently than it already does.
Last I heard they'd removed over 6,000 words from the Psychic Phase section alone and weren't done with that part of the rules yet.
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Post by: koooaei
You can leave as few words describing how psy stuff works as possible, it wouldn't change the fact that a psycher with invisibility is game-breaking. It just proceeds breaking without causing logical collisions on the way down.
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Post by: Pouncey
koooaei wrote:You can leave as few words describing how psy stuff works as possible, it wouldn't change the fact that a psycher with invisibility is game-breaking. It just proceeds breaking without causing logical collisions on the way down.
I agree. The problems with WH40k rules go beyond just how they're written and into what those rules actually are. I fully agree with you there.
But "clear and concise" should be an aim of any rules for anything, especially a good one.
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Post by: koooaei
Pouncey wrote:
But "clear and concise" should be an aim of any rules for anything, especially a good one.
That's true but what we currently have is neither "clear and concise" nor "balanced". I'd prefer to get "balanced" first.
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Post by: Pouncey
koooaei wrote: Pouncey wrote:
But "clear and concise" should be an aim of any rules for anything, especially a good one.
That's true but what we currently have is neither "clear and concise" nor "balanced". I'd prefer to get "balanced" first.
Probably that's a good approach.
Ideally, for a game that's been around for 7 editions and... is it up to 30 years yet? I know it's over 25, but is Rogue Trader 30 years old yet? Whatever, 25-30 years, they should really have both by now.
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Post by: Crimson
Peregrine wrote:
This is not necessarily true. It's possible that something about the manufacturing process causes distortion/air bubbles/whatever to form in a consistent manner, which would have the bias always favor the same side. For example, maybe the 1 side is at the top of the mold, and any air bubbles that form rise a bit before the plastic cools enough to make their location permanent. It wouldn't be a thing without precedent, cast resin models often have bubbles/mold slip/etc in the same place across multiple casts because that's where that particular mold doesn't work quite right.
Valid point. Still, the systematic imbalance as large as described in the article is implausible. I doubt you would get such massive imbalance without intentionally weighting the dice.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Peregrine wrote:
This is not necessarily true. It's possible that something about the manufacturing process causes distortion/air bubbles/whatever to form in a consistent manner, which would have the bias always favor the same side. For example, maybe the 1 side is at the top of the mold, and any air bubbles that form rise a bit before the plastic cools enough to make their location permanent. It wouldn't be a thing without precedent, cast resin models often have bubbles/mold slip/etc in the same place across multiple casts because that's where that particular mold doesn't work quite right.
Valid point. Still, the systematic imbalance as large as described in the article is implausible. I doubt you would get such massive imbalance without intentionally weighting the dice.
I thought the article described what they found when they physically dissected all of their dice to see what was inside them.
Honestly I thought when that guy you just quoted was talking about air bubbles he wasn't speaking hypothetically about those air bubbles being inside GW dice. Because when you cut open GW dice, what you find are air bubbles and plastic seeds.
Also they were able to somehow correlate each die's air bubbles to how much more often than average each die rolled 1s.
And they don't have to really intentionally weight the dice to get imbalances like this. They just have to shave off the corners to save on material. If you're able to rebuild your GW dice's shaved-off corners, you get dice that roll pretty darned fairly, with about 19% 1s.
Also, shaving off the corners make these kinds of imbalances possible. The air bubbles in each die seem to directly affect how bad the imbalance is.
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Post by: koooaei
I've bought cheap dice like this ones
They cost like 4-5 cents per one, can be bought en masse for ~3 cents online. They've been pretty ok.
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Post by: Pouncey
koooaei wrote:I've bought cheap dice like this ones
They cost like 4-5 cents per one, can be bought en masse for 2-3 cents online. They've been pretty ok.
Yeah, that's fine.
I mean, even the article that claimed to have proved that GW dice roll somewhere between 23% and 33% 1s didn't say you should never use GW dice, because a game could easily be designed to accommodate that kind of imbalance. Like, for example, having a thing where rolling low is sometimes good (Leadership tests of any sort, also characteristic tests).
I think its main suggestion was that you should use the same dice for everything, and call out people who use casino dice normally and GW dice for Leadership tests as cheaters.
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Post by: Backfire
Crimson wrote: The results of the study are pretty incredible and anyone can test themselves whether their dice behave like this test claims (mine certainly don't.) Furthermore, there is a clear motive for this to be a hoax, the aricle directly links to a store selling 'perfect dice.' (Not saying that this necessarily is a hoax rather just an experiment with some systemic flaw, but that possibility certainly comes to mind.)
Yeah, I did my own 600 throw test (with Chessex dice) after reading the article. Sure that's a pretty small sample, but I marked down the results after every 100 throws, and the distribution went gradually towards what you would expect (16.67 etc). In the end, '1' was the LEAST common result. It is of course POSSIBLE that had I continued the test, the '1' suddenly would have become much more common, but quite unlikely. So yeah, the article was a hoax, or at very least completely irrelevant to an actual wargamer. ps. I play Deathwing so I'd notice if every 4th roll was '1'.
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Post by: Pouncey
Backfire wrote: Crimson wrote:
The results of the study are pretty incredible and anyone can test themselves whether their dice behave like this test claims (mine certainly don't.)
Furthermore, there is a clear motive for this to be a hoax, the aricle directly links to a store selling 'perfect dice.' (Not saying that this necessarily is a hoax rather just an experiment with some systemic flaw, but that possibility certainly comes to mind.)
Yeah, I did my own 600 throw test (with Chessex dice) after reading the article. Sure that's a pretty small sample, but I marked down the results after every 100 throws, and the distribution went gradually towards what you would expect (16.67 etc). In the end, '1' was the LEAST common result.
It is of course POSSIBLE that had I continued the test, the '1' suddenly would have become much more common, but quite unlikely.
So yeah, the article was a hoax, or at very least completely irrelevant to an actual wargamer.
ps. I play Deathwing so I'd notice if every 4th roll was '1'.
Wow.
You only wrote down the results after every 100 rolls?
You have an amazing memory to be able to remember 100 numbers each ranging from 1-6 before you can't remember anymore and have to write stuff down.
Like, seriously, I'm so amazed I literally don't believe it. And I have a pretty good memory myself.
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Post by: Yarium
Pouncey wrote:Backfire wrote: Crimson wrote:
The results of the study are pretty incredible and anyone can test themselves whether their dice behave like this test claims (mine certainly don't.)
Furthermore, there is a clear motive for this to be a hoax, the aricle directly links to a store selling 'perfect dice.' (Not saying that this necessarily is a hoax rather just an experiment with some systemic flaw, but that possibility certainly comes to mind.)
Yeah, I did my own 600 throw test (with Chessex dice) after reading the article. Sure that's a pretty small sample, but I marked down the results after every 100 throws, and the distribution went gradually towards what you would expect (16.67 etc). In the end, '1' was the LEAST common result.
It is of course POSSIBLE that had I continued the test, the '1' suddenly would have become much more common, but quite unlikely.
So yeah, the article was a hoax, or at very least completely irrelevant to an actual wargamer.
ps. I play Deathwing so I'd notice if every 4th roll was '1'.
Wow.
You only wrote down the results after every 100 rolls?
You have an amazing memory to be able to remember 100 numbers each ranging from 1-6 before you can't remember anymore and have to write stuff down.
Like, seriously, I'm so amazed I literally don't believe it. And I have a pretty good memory myself.
Or...
It's entirely possible that the tester in this case was only counting results of "1", in which case, they only had to remember how many 1's were rolled. Everything else is "not 1" in this case. They are not stating that the dice aren't weighted or improper, but that a result of "1" verses "not 1" fits an approximation of a standard distribution.
This thread should be locked, as it really is just going in circles. This is the circle I've seen:
"The dice are rigged as per study."
"Study is no good, for reasons."
"That okay, study still generally good."
"Me do study that is generally good."
"Your study no good though, for reasons."
"But you say reasons still generally good!"
"Me be very specific now. The dice are rigged as per study."
"But study no good! We've said this already..."
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Post by: Ratius
No, its a frustrating thread because dice have nothing to do with GWs rules writing abilities - whether you view them as good or bad.
You can still build that deathstar with 2+++++ and roll a one. Pooof, goodbye deathstar.
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Post by: koooaei
You fail tactically if you roll a 1.
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Post by: Ratius
Aw hell bring back 1+ saves so.
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Post by: Pouncey
 Yarium wrote: Pouncey wrote:Backfire wrote: Crimson wrote:
The results of the study are pretty incredible and anyone can test themselves whether their dice behave like this test claims (mine certainly don't.)
Furthermore, there is a clear motive for this to be a hoax, the aricle directly links to a store selling 'perfect dice.' (Not saying that this necessarily is a hoax rather just an experiment with some systemic flaw, but that possibility certainly comes to mind.)
Yeah, I did my own 600 throw test (with Chessex dice) after reading the article. Sure that's a pretty small sample, but I marked down the results after every 100 throws, and the distribution went gradually towards what you would expect (16.67 etc). In the end, '1' was the LEAST common result.
It is of course POSSIBLE that had I continued the test, the '1' suddenly would have become much more common, but quite unlikely.
So yeah, the article was a hoax, or at very least completely irrelevant to an actual wargamer.
ps. I play Deathwing so I'd notice if every 4th roll was '1'.
Wow.
You only wrote down the results after every 100 rolls?
You have an amazing memory to be able to remember 100 numbers each ranging from 1-6 before you can't remember anymore and have to write stuff down.
Like, seriously, I'm so amazed I literally don't believe it. And I have a pretty good memory myself.
Or...
It's entirely possible that the tester in this case was only counting results of "1", in which case, they only had to remember how many 1's were rolled. Everything else is "not 1" in this case. They are not stating that the dice aren't weighted or improper, but that a result of "1" verses "not 1" fits an approximation of a standard distribution.
This thread should be locked, as it really is just going in circles. This is the circle I've seen:
"The dice are rigged as per study."
"Study is no good, for reasons."
"That okay, study still generally good."
"Me do study that is generally good."
"Your study no good though, for reasons."
"But you say reasons still generally good!"
"Me be very specific now. The dice are rigged as per study."
"But study no good! We've said this already..."
I'll try to break the cycle with something new then.
I'm completely uneducated in physics, but it seems to me that something that might have an effect of some sort on the result of a dice roll that is determined by physics, is having 9 identical dice in motion nearby during that roll that that single die might bounce off of at some point during the roll.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ratius wrote:No, its a frustrating thread because dice have nothing to do with GWs rules writing abilities - whether you view them as good or bad.
You can still build that deathstar with 2+++++ and roll a one. Pooof, goodbye deathstar.
That's the other thing. The OP was never even really about the dice thing at all. I wasn't expecting anyone who read this thread to even treat it as something they didn't already know about and accept as true, much less argue with.
The dice thing I mentioned in the OP was just background information to the actual thing I was wanting to say that relates to the title.
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Post by: Ratius
Fair enough but mentioning dice and your thought experiments to control them was only going to have the topic go one way......
Maybe next time just ask "whats wrong with 40ks ruleset?"
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Post by: Diogenes
Pouncey wrote:Many years ago, probably during 5th edition, I learned of that scientific study where a Professor effectively proved that GW and Chessex dice are inherently unfair through 36,000 rolls of dice from 4 different brands.
Naturally, I set out to acquire some better dice for my games. I went to a local gaming store to order some dice from a catalog, and I ended up talking to the owner of the store working the counter about the study that led me to his store in the first place. He'd also heard of it, so we talked about it for a bit, and when I tried to buy some of those board game dice that were more fair than GW dice but not as expensive as casino dice, he asked if the dice were for Warhammer 40k. I said yes, because it was the only tabletop game I played of any sort. So he replied to me, something very similar to, "You don't need to buy new dice. If you're playing Warhammer 40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about game balance to need fair dice."
That's a pretty rough situation for your game's balance when people are saying things like that to convince customers not to buy stuff from them.
I didn't even argue or disagree, and immediately picked up 2 sets of Chessex dice off the shelves that looked pretty and bought them, since I like pretty dice.
I have never regretted my decision to buy inherently unfair dice for WH40k that have screwed me over a lot in my games by making my melta weapons roll 1s up to twice as often as they should be, over insisting that my dice be mostly fair when I play WH40k and buying some standard board game dice instead.
Also, that was during 5th edition. Things have gotten a LOT worse since then in terms of game balance.
1. Citation required or it never happened.
2. Have you considered chess? I mean it's not completely balanced either (White always go first) but the price of entry is much lower.
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Post by: MarsNZ
I wonder how many games are won by rolling that tactical 6 on a stomp or D table.
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Post by: koooaei
MarsNZ wrote:
I wonder how many games are won by rolling that tactical 6 on a stomp or D table.
Around 1/6. If your dice are evenly weighted inside.
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Post by: Pouncey
Ratius wrote:Fair enough but mentioning dice and your thought experiments to control them was only going to have the topic go one way......
Maybe next time just ask "whats wrong with 40ks ruleset?"
Yeah, I usually succeed in avoiding mentioning my attempts to control dice rolls over a decade ago on this forum I started posting on 5 years ago. Because I never really got the impression that people here would be open to the idea that that was possible and would probably just call me a liar the whole time.
I wasn't wrong, was I?
This time I mentioned it only because I misunderstood what I was replying to while I'd been awake for 3 days straight and thought someone wrote a paragraph-long post seriously discussing the possibility I'm not a liar, in response to a very minor mention I thought I remembered slipping into a post somewhere that I thought everyone would miss. I should've deleted that post entirely when I re-read what I was replying to and saw it was about something else, before anyone had responded to it, instead of editing it with a statement about how I misunderstood what I was replying to.
Also, I didn't think mentioning the thing about GW dice rolling tons more 1s than they should would be a big deal. The last I read on this forum, pretty much everyone was taking it to be completely proven. And I thought it was so unquestionably accepted around here that the only reason I mentioned it at all was because reading that study is what set me off to the store, where the thing the store owner told me was what I considered to be, and let me quote the title here: "The Ultimate Condemnation of WH40k's Rules".
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Diogenes wrote: Pouncey wrote:Many years ago, probably during 5th edition, I learned of that scientific study where a Professor effectively proved that GW and Chessex dice are inherently unfair through 36,000 rolls of dice from 4 different brands.
Naturally, I set out to acquire some better dice for my games. I went to a local gaming store to order some dice from a catalog, and I ended up talking to the owner of the store working the counter about the study that led me to his store in the first place. He'd also heard of it, so we talked about it for a bit, and when I tried to buy some of those board game dice that were more fair than GW dice but not as expensive as casino dice, he asked if the dice were for Warhammer 40k. I said yes, because it was the only tabletop game I played of any sort. So he replied to me, something very similar to, "You don't need to buy new dice. If you're playing Warhammer 40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about game balance to need fair dice."
That's a pretty rough situation for your game's balance when people are saying things like that to convince customers not to buy stuff from them.
I didn't even argue or disagree, and immediately picked up 2 sets of Chessex dice off the shelves that looked pretty and bought them, since I like pretty dice.
I have never regretted my decision to buy inherently unfair dice for WH40k that have screwed me over a lot in my games by making my melta weapons roll 1s up to twice as often as they should be, over insisting that my dice be mostly fair when I play WH40k and buying some standard board game dice instead.
Also, that was during 5th edition. Things have gotten a LOT worse since then in terms of game balance.
1. Citation required or it never happened.
I'll get right on proving that one thing happened one time in a small store 5 years ago that I wasn't expecting to happen to the point I'd've brought a video camera to record it or have enough time to whip out a cell phone to record it happening before it was already over.
So basically, citation will not be incoming. Citation is not possible, unless you wanna track down the guy working the desk at some point around 5 years ago at a store called Fandom II in downtown Ottawa, give him a ring and ask, "Hey, did you say this one thing to this one guy who was in your store one time five years ago who you've never seen since and probably don't remember?"
2. Have you considered chess? I mean it's not completely balanced either (White always go first) but the price of entry is much lower.
Personally I decided to play video games instead of tabletop games.
I have 15,000 hours spent playing WoW since 2007. Also I was playing WH40k tabletop pretty much every week from 2006 up until 2011. Also I have over 50,000 posts on the WoW forums.
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Post by: Backfire
Pouncey wrote:
You only wrote down the results after every 100 rolls?
You have an amazing memory to be able to remember 100 numbers each ranging from 1-6 before you can't remember anymore and have to write stuff down.
Like, seriously, I'm so amazed I literally don't believe it. And I have a pretty good memory myself.
No, I was unclear. What I did was that I marked down the result of each throw, and when I reached 100 throws, I'd add them up and calculate distribution. At first '100' there were some big differences in percentiles but they smoothed over as the trial progressed.
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Post by: Pouncey
Backfire wrote: Pouncey wrote:
You only wrote down the results after every 100 rolls?
You have an amazing memory to be able to remember 100 numbers each ranging from 1-6 before you can't remember anymore and have to write stuff down.
Like, seriously, I'm so amazed I literally don't believe it. And I have a pretty good memory myself.
No, I was unclear. What I did was that I marked down the result of each throw, and when I reached 100 throws, I'd add them up and calculate distribution. At first '100' there were some big differences in percentiles but they smoothed over as the trial progressed.
Why calculate distribution every 100 throws instead of after the end total of 600 throws?
That's not really snark, I'm legitimately wondering if there's a reason to do so, since there could easily be a totally valid reason I don't know about.
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Post by: Crimson
About it mattering whether you roll dice separately or together, I doubt it would. Sure, if you roll them together the dice will bounce against each other but that is completely random too.
But, I tested that too.
500 rolls, ten dice used, but each rolled separately. Exactly 16% of ones.
The article is complete bolllocks. The real reason why some people think that their dice roll more ones is the confirmation bias. When I did my 2000 dice test, rolling ten dice at once, I manged to twice to roll five ones at once. Now, were that happen when I was rolling saves for my terminators I would remember that for a long time and might end up thinking that my dice are cursed or something. But that's random for you, sometimes these things happen.
As for the dice not being the original point, there was no original point. There was a story about some guy who thought that 40K rules were bad for unspecified reasons. So? And then there was a claim about having superpowers that allow controlling dice and then rambling about psychic rodents...
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Post by: Pouncey
Also, you wanna know why I question you even think your thing where you rolled a die 600 times and recorded each result, and because your results after 600 rolls evened out to a fairly even distribution of results, means that the article claiming to show that GW dice roll around 26% 1s on average is wrong since it'd average out to 16.7% or so over long periods of time with hundreds of rolls?
Because it means you probably didn't even read the article at all. The article claimed they rolled each die 1,000 times. If 600 rolls is enough to even out the results, the article should've reached that point on every single die with 400 fewer recorded rolls on each die they tested. They tested 144 dice by rolling them 1,000 times each.
That article claims to have rolled each die they tested 400 more times than the 600 times you tested only a single die.
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Crimson wrote:About it mattering whether you roll dice separately or together, I doubt it would. Sure, if you roll them together the dice will bounce against each other but that is completely random too.
But, I tested that too.
500 rolls, ten dice used, but each rolled separately. Exactly 16% of ones.
The article is complete bolllocks. The real reason why some people think that their dice roll more ones is the confirmation bias. When I did my 2000 dice test, rolling ten dice at once, I manged to twice to roll five ones at once. Now, were that happen when I was rolling saves for my terminators I would remember that for a long time and might end up thinking that my dice are cursed or something. But that's random for you, sometimes these things happen.
As for the dice not being the original point, there was no original point. There was a story about some guy who thought that 40K rules were bad for unspecified reasons. So? And then there was a claim about having superpowers that allow controlling dice and then rambling about psychic rodents...
Sharing our random WH40k-related stories is just something we do around here on Dakka.
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Post by: Yarium
Pouncey wrote:I'll try to break the cycle with something new then. I'm completely uneducated in physics, but it seems to me that something that might have an effect of some sort on the result of a dice roll that is determined by physics, is having 9 identical dice in motion nearby during that roll that that single die might bounce off of at some point during the roll.
I'll try to help you then. Yes, they will definitely influence the roll, but not in any meaningful way. Let's pretend you have two completely random real numbers that are truly random, and you multiply them together. Is the product more random, as random, or less random than either of the original random numbers? The answer is; exactly as random. I could also add the results together, subtract them, divide them, etc. So long as both of them are truly random, any possible outcome of either number is possible, which includes the outcome of both of them multiplied together. Did the act of them interacting influence the outcome? Yes. But did it do so in a meaningful way? No. I did not achieve a "more random" result. Same happens for a die throw. The die is already interacting with an untold number of random factors; the sides of your hands, the table, the wall, the air current, the air temperature, the influence of Jupiter's incredibly tiny gravity at this distance, the slightly larger influence of your opponent's gravity at this distance... They're all random and influencing the result. Having it bounce a few times (or, in fact, a random number of times) off of some other dice will not influence the result in a meaningful way. The result of a die bouncing on the table is just as random as the result of a die bouncing on the table, and bouncing off another die.
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Post by: Pouncey
Yarium wrote: Pouncey wrote:I'll try to break the cycle with something new then.
I'm completely uneducated in physics, but it seems to me that something that might have an effect of some sort on the result of a dice roll that is determined by physics, is having 9 identical dice in motion nearby during that roll that that single die might bounce off of at some point during the roll.
I'll try to help you then. Yes, they will definitely influence the roll, but not in any meaningful way. Let's pretend you have two completely random real numbers that are truly random, and you multiply them together. Is the product more random, as random, or less random than either of the original random numbers? The answer is; exactly as random. I could also add the results together, subtract them, divide them, etc. So long as both of them as truly random, any possible outcome of either number is possible, which includes the outcome of both of them multiplied together. Did the act of them interacting influence the outcome? Yes. But did it do so in a meaningful way? No. I did not achieve a "more random" result.
Same happens for a die throw. The die is already interacting with an untold number of random factors; the sides of your hands, the table, the wall, the air current, the air temperature, the influence of Jupiter's incredibly tiny gravity at this distance, the slightly larger influence of your opponent's gravity at this distance... They're all random and influencing the result. Having it bounce a few times (or, in fact, a random number of times) off of some other dice will not influence the result in a meaningful way. The result of a die bouncing on the table is just as random as the result of a die bouncing on the table, and bouncing off another die.
And the only way in which dice are random is in the human brain's inability to predict the result. The result you get is determined entirely by physics, and if you can influence a result controlled by physics by introducing more variables to the calculations, then you can alter the outcome. Having multiple dice bouncing against each other probably does make the results more even. The reason casinos require you to roll in a very specific way (two of the three requirements are that the dice bounce off the table and at last one wall, literally bouncing off of other objects) is because doing so results in a more even distribution of results, for casino dice that are already required to be perfectly balanced before they can leave the factory.
The thing you're discounting as a possible explanation for a non-even distribution of results in one case, and a non-even distribution in other cases, with the exact same dice, is already the reason that casinos require you do to things with dice that would require that explanation to be true to give you a reason to do them at all.
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Post by: Tamwulf
This thread makes me want to always blame my dice every time I lose. And now I have the proof! Thank you!
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Post by: Ratius
What if you rolled a dice in space and let it keep rolling until it reached the outer limits of our known Universe and was destroyed?
Would that be an unlucky 1 or a terrific 6?
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Post by: Pouncey
Ratius wrote:What if you rolled a dice in space and let it keep rolling until it reached the outer limits of our known Universe and was destroyed?
Would that be an unlucky 1 or a terrific 6?
Well, for one thing, no human would care since the heat death of the universe would've happened already and humans will cease existing so long before that that the possibility that humans might still be around by then is ludicrous since even if we didn't get wiped out we'd've evolved into a species so different from humans that calling our descendants humans at that point is a dumb thing to say.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
And the only way in which dice are random is in the human brain's inability to predict the result.
Not necessarily. Many interpretations of quantum physics suggest that randomness is in fact real. Of course whether that results randomness on macro level is debatable.
The result you get is determined entirely by physics, and if you can influence a result controlled by physics by introducing more variables to the calculations, then you can alter the outcome. Having multiple dice bouncing against each other probably does make the results more even. The reason casinos require you to roll in a very specific way (two of the three requirements are that the dice bounce off the table and at last one wall, literally bouncing off of other objects) is because doing so results in a more even distribution of results, for casino dice that are already required to be perfectly balanced before they can leave the factory.
It is indeed possible to learn to somewhat control the results of small number of dice if you throw then carefully in a certain way and Casinos want to prevent people from doing that. But that's really not relevant unless people playing 40K (and the people who purportedly made the study.) were intentionally attempting to roll more ones.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
And the only way in which dice are random is in the human brain's inability to predict the result.
Not necessarily. Many interpretations of quantum physics suggest that randomness is in fact real. Of course whether that results randomness on macro level is debatable.
Quantum physics, by definition, applies only to things smaller than an atom. Dice are very noticeably larger than an atom. And you can't just scale up physics calculations from the quantum scale to the macro scale and expect to get the same results. Scaling up a model rocket the size of a toy that works fine, to a rocket the size of an ICBM you're expecting to put something into space, and expecting the physics to be the same that simply making it bigger means it should work just fine, is something that's already been proven wrong. If you want to see the results of that kind of thinking being put into practice with rockets the size of ICBMs, just look up the clip reel of early rocket designs failing incredibly spectacularly in giant explosions after failing to get off the launch pad, and other ways a rocket with incorrect physics can explode when it's test-launched. You've probably already seen it.
The result you get is determined entirely by physics, and if you can influence a result controlled by physics by introducing more variables to the calculations, then you can alter the outcome. Having multiple dice bouncing against each other probably does make the results more even. The reason casinos require you to roll in a very specific way (two of the three requirements are that the dice bounce off the table and at last one wall, literally bouncing off of other objects) is because doing so results in a more even distribution of results, for casino dice that are already required to be perfectly balanced before they can leave the factory.
It is indeed possible to learn to somewhat control the results of small number of dice if you throw then carefully in a certain way and Casinos want to prevent people from doing that. But that's really not relevant unless people playing 40K (and the people who purportedly made the study.) were intentionally attempting to roll more ones.
Setting aside the obvious tie-in to an earlier topic I don't want to discuss, the article's analysis of dice was done because people already believed that casino dice rolled 1s less often than GW dice that they were trying to cheat by using GW dice for stuff where they required a low result even though they also had enough casino dice to do everything else in the game.
Also, I roll single dice a lot as a Sisters of Battle player. And the results are pretty important. Like, figuring out how many shots my Exorcist gets that turn is controlled by 1d6 that can never be legitimately rolled alongside any other dice. Firing a BSS' only meltagun at a tank, also mean I only roll one die. Attempting an Act of Faith also requires me to roll one die. Situations where I roll 4-5 single d6s consecutively are something that comes up in pretty much every game, even when I'm rolling all the dice I'm allowed to roll at the time by the actual rules.
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Post by: Pouncey
It's a fun way to roll dice being marketed as simply being more fun than rolling them with your hand.
I didn't read the whole thing though. Did they actually suggest it might result in your dice rolls having a different outcome at any point?
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Post by: Yarium
Pouncey wrote:And the only way in which dice are random is in the human brain's inability to predict the result. The result you get is determined entirely by physics, and if you can influence a result controlled by physics by introducing more variables to the calculations, then you can alter the outcome. Having multiple dice bouncing against each other probably does make the results more even. The reason casinos require you to roll in a very specific way (two of the three requirements are that the dice bounce off the table and at last one wall, literally bouncing off of other objects) is because doing so results in a more even distribution of results, for casino dice that are already required to be perfectly balanced before they can leave the factory.
The thing you're discounting as a possible explanation for a non-even distribution of results in one case, and a non-even distribution in other cases, with the exact same dice, is already the reason that casinos require you do to things with dice that would require that explanation to be true to give you a reason to do them at all.
By that extension, it is impossible for any roll to be random enough. Guess you can't play 40k then, since each and every outcome is knowable if you had perfect knowledge. Except, you don't have perfect knowledge, which is true even without bringing up quantum physics! At what point is something "random enough"? For a casino, it's what you have pointed out; it must go past a line, bounce off the table, and hit the wall (the walls of which are a special shape). At minimum this means 2 "bounces". This is done to ensure that someone can not learn to throw the dice in a specific way to achieve a specific outcome. Those wall liners are also changed regularly to change the axis at which the same roll will achieve the same result.
If two bounces is good enough for a casino, then I'm sure it's good enough for this test, and additional knocking into things will only make the results MORE accurate rather than less.
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Post by: Pouncey
Yarium wrote: Pouncey wrote:And the only way in which dice are random is in the human brain's inability to predict the result. The result you get is determined entirely by physics, and if you can influence a result controlled by physics by introducing more variables to the calculations, then you can alter the outcome. Having multiple dice bouncing against each other probably does make the results more even. The reason casinos require you to roll in a very specific way (two of the three requirements are that the dice bounce off the table and at last one wall, literally bouncing off of other objects) is because doing so results in a more even distribution of results, for casino dice that are already required to be perfectly balanced before they can leave the factory.
The thing you're discounting as a possible explanation for a non-even distribution of results in one case, and a non-even distribution in other cases, with the exact same dice, is already the reason that casinos require you do to things with dice that would require that explanation to be true to give you a reason to do them at all.
By that extension, it is impossible for any roll to be random enough. Guess you can't play 40k then, since each and every outcome is knowable if you had perfect knowledge. Except, you don't have perfect knowledge, which is true even without bringing up quantum physics! At what point is something "random enough"? For a casino, it's what you have pointed out; it must go past a line, bounce off the table, and hit the wall (the walls of which are a special shape). At minimum this means 2 "bounces". This is done to ensure that someone can not learn to throw the dice in a specific way to achieve a specific outcome. Those wall liners are also changed regularly to change the axis at which the same roll will achieve the same result.
If two bounces is good enough for a casino, then I'm sure it's good enough for this test, and additional knocking into things will only make the results MORE accurate rather than less.
Apparently casinos think that if you just roll dice normally without having to bounce them off two different solid objects, the thing they're more likely to do than anything else is to flip once. So you could roll as casinos require you to do, and if the only part of it you try to control at all is what face of the die starts the roll facing up, unless you do the part where you bounce those dice off the floor of the table and at least one wall, casinos consider the probability of people doing what you just did in this hypothetical example, to try to win money from them in Craps games, to be so high they implemented the additional rules of bouncing the dice off two different parts of the table to prevent people from skewing their own individual results significantly enough the casino would lose money overall.
Also, yes, dice are not actually random, we only call them random because we don't normally have enough information to predict the result before it actually happens. Good, you finally got there.
Also, how many solid objects were the dice in your test bounced off of? Up to 9 other dice and maybe the table itself? How many solid objects were the dice in the article bounced off of? 1 when it bounced off the table?
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Post by: NightWinds5121
While I think there are certainly some imbalances here and there, ultimately there are so many 40k rules and units and formation etc that have been progressing, its a bit of a double edged sword, there's tons of cool content but a lot to balance. Certainly there are a few units that are glaringly under-costed, but That's fine with me, as I try play for fun, I try to win but at the end of the day I want my opponent to think, That sure was a fun game, not wow that guys army sure was powerful he whooped me. Of course it is more fun to see our own forces do well, but my thought is you win some and you lose some, and it is always enjoyable to see some awesome looking warhammer models battling on a good looking board with scenery.
Despite that, however, and I didn't read the article just skimmed some of the posts, GW dice rolling 1's 23% rather than 16% does worry me a bit, as I like plasma and don't want to kill my loyal and hand crafted troopers when I play! Well, who cares about killing them, they are maniacal followers of Khorne after all, but I don't want to prevent them from blasting the enemy! Last game I played my Helbrute did 'gets hot' roll its plasma cannon three rounds in a row! (Clearly some bad luck here as ~7%, if true, won't cause this)
At minimum I would like 10,000 dice rolls to draw any conclusion for the %s. Ideally I would prefer to see %s drawn from an number like 100,000. Before anyone can condemn the accuracy of GW dice it should be supported by hard evidence.
Still, I don't want to Gets Hot my troops, nor miss those paid-for 2+ to wound rolls. Does anyone know of good dice, that don't roll more 1's? The Forge World Legion dice look really awesome, what's the chances they roll evenly?
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Post by: Yarium
Pouncey wrote:If two bounces is good enough for a casino, then I'm sure it's good enough for this test, and additional knocking into things will only make the results MORE accurate rather than less.
Apparently casinos think that if you just roll dice normally without having to bounce them off two different solid objects, the thing they're more likely to do than anything else is to flip once. So you could roll as casinos require you to do, and if the only part of it you try to control at all is what face of the die starts the roll facing up, unless you do the part where you bounce those dice off the floor of the table and at least one wall, casinos consider the probability of people doing what you just did in this hypothetical example, to try to win money from them in Craps games, to be so high they implemented the additional rules of bouncing the dice off two different parts of the table to prevent people from skewing their own individual results significantly enough the casino would lose money overall.
Also, yes, dice are not actually random, we only call them random because we don't normally have enough information to predict the result before it actually happens. Good, you finally got there.
Also, how many solid objects were the dice in your test bounced off of? Up to 9 other dice and maybe the table itself? How many solid objects were the dice in the article bounced off of? 1 when it bounced off the table?
I'm afraid I don't quite understand.
First; I have not done the test. I am saying that other people here have done the test.
Second; From this test, you don't know how many bounces they have done, but if 2 is sufficient, then the only number lower than that is 1. I don't believe each and every dice they rolled was a single "flip". Aside from the situation where someone holds a die in their palm, resting the back of their hand on the table, and turns their hand over, I have never seen these dice just flip once.
Third; Are you resting this entire argument on them not getting a second bounce? Seems like a real stretch.
Fourth; No one has suggested anything other than the dice not being perfectly random, only that they're "random enough".
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Post by: Pouncey
NightWinds5121 wrote:While I think there are certainly some imbalances here and there, ultimately there are so many 40k rules and units and formation etc that have been progressing, its a bit of a double edged sword, there's tons of cool content but a lot to balance. Certainly there are a few units that are glaringly under-costed, but That's fine with me, as I try play for fun, I try to win but at the end of the day I want my opponent to think, That sure was a fun game, not wow that guys army sure was powerful he whooped me. Of course it is more fun to see our own forces do well, but my thought is you win some and you lose some, and it is always enjoyable to see some awesome looking warhammer models battling on a good looking board with scenery.
Despite that, however, and I didn't read the article just skimmed some of the posts, GW dice rolling 1's 23% rather than 16% does worry me a bit, as I like plasma and don't want to kill my loyal and hand crafted troopers when I play! Well, who cares about killing them, they are maniacal followers of Khorne after all, but I don't want to prevent them from blasting the enemy! Last game I played my Helbrute did 'gets hot' roll its plasma cannon three rounds in a row! (Clearly some bad luck here as ~7%, if true, won't cause this)
At minimum I would like 10,000 dice rolls to draw any conclusion for the %s. Ideally I would prefer to see %s drawn from an number like 100,000. Before anyone can condemn the accuracy of GW dice it should be supported by hard evidence.
Still, I don't want to Gets Hot my troops, nor miss those paid-for 2+ to wound rolls. Does anyone know of good dice, that don't roll more 1's? The Forge World Legion dice look really awesome, what's the chances they roll evenly?
So, uh, if I link you an article with over 100,000 dice rolls that says GW dice roll at least 23% 1s, you'll accept it? Really? You want me to find a guy so bored he rolled dice a hundred thousand times just to prove this thing that doesn't matter to anything important? That's the proof you require, and if I instead linked you something with less than 10,000 rolls you'd call it bullgak?
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
Quantum physics, by definition, applies only to things smaller than an atom. Dice are very noticeably larger than an atom. And you can't just scale up physics calculations from the quantum scale to the macro scale and expect to get the same results. Scaling up a model rocket the size of a toy that works fine, to a rocket the size of an ICBM you're expecting to put something into space, and expecting the physics to be the same that simply making it bigger means it should work just fine, is something that's already been proven wrong. If you want to see the results of that kind of thinking being put into practice with rockets the size of ICBMs, just look up the clip reel of early rocket designs failing incredibly spectacularly in giant explosions after failing to get off the launch pad, and other ways a rocket with incorrect physics can explode when it's test-launched. You've probably already seen it.
It's not quite that simple. Quantum effects affect the very matter we are made of. While it is true that most of the time the sheer insane amount of quantum events cancel each other out and the big picture is more or less deterministic, there are situation where behaviour of couple of atoms can butterfly to cause large scale effects. Most obvious examples are conception and mutation in DNA. So in an alternate universe with same starting conditions you probably wouldn't exist, hell, there's a good chance that entire human race wouldn't exist. Of course because we can only observe this one universe, the scope of these effects is difficult to assess.
And in any case, even in a deterministic system there effectively is randomness as it is impossible to know all variables. It is even theoretically impossible, as very act of measuring will affect the state of the thing being measured thus leading to uncertainty.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
Quantum physics, by definition, applies only to things smaller than an atom. Dice are very noticeably larger than an atom. And you can't just scale up physics calculations from the quantum scale to the macro scale and expect to get the same results. Scaling up a model rocket the size of a toy that works fine, to a rocket the size of an ICBM you're expecting to put something into space, and expecting the physics to be the same that simply making it bigger means it should work just fine, is something that's already been proven wrong. If you want to see the results of that kind of thinking being put into practice with rockets the size of ICBMs, just look up the clip reel of early rocket designs failing incredibly spectacularly in giant explosions after failing to get off the launch pad, and other ways a rocket with incorrect physics can explode when it's test-launched. You've probably already seen it.
It's not quite that simple. Quantum effects affect the very matter we are made of. While it is true that most of the time the sheer insane amount of quantum events cancel each other out and the big picture is more or less deterministic, there are situation where behaviour of couple of atoms can butterfly to cause large scale effects. Most obvious examples are conception and mutation in DNA. So in an alternate universe with same starting conditions you probably wouldn't exist, hell, there's a good chance that entire human race wouldn't exist. Of course because we can only observe this one universe, the scope of these effects is difficult to assess.
And in any case, even in a deterministic system there effectively is randomness as it is impossible to know all variables. It is even theoretically impossible, as very act of measuring will affect the state of the thing being measured thus leading to uncertainty.
You, uh, do realize why it's considered so exciting for scientists that Quantum Mechanics includes things that seem to actually happen at random, instead of us just being unable to predict the totally-predictable result because we don't have information, right?
Because Quantum Mechanics is the only place where saying something is "actually random, not just unpredictable to human minds who can't have enough information due to practicality" is actually true.
With Quantum Mechanics, doing the exact same thing with the exact same process can result in a different thing happening.
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Post by: Crimson
But back to the dice. It is not really the number of the rolls here that is crucial. One person can claim that they rolled million times, we can't verify This 'study' has existed for a while and it has been discussed many times. Always a number of people will come up with their own tests (smaller in scope that the claimed scale in the article, but still) which go against the results of the article. So if a large number of people claim that their test give the pretty much expected results and one person claims that their test gives extraordinary results (which are totally valid and not at all made up to sell this expensive product that will fix this real and serious issue) then it is the one person who's data is an outlier that is suspect. Automatically Appended Next Post: Pouncey wrote:
With Quantum Mechanics, doing the exact same thing with the exact same process can result in a different thing happening.
Indeed. And these quantum effects can and do affect the world. This is not in question. Quantum mechanics literally affect the behaviour of every atom in your body!
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:But back to the dice. It is not really the number of the rolls here that is crucial. One person can claim that they rolled million times, we can't verify This 'study' has existed for a while and it has been discussed many times. Always a number of people will come up with their own tests (smaller in scope that the claimed scale in the article, but still) which go against the results of the article. So if a large number of people claim that their test give the pretty much expected results and one person claims that their test gives extraordinary results (which are totally valid and not at all made up to sell this expensive product that will fix this real and serious issue) then it is the one person who's data is an outlier that is suspect.
I'm wondering what the point of asking for proof is at all if the only proof you are ever going to receive is something you're going to say was made-up anyways.
Couldn't I just say, "Hey, this guy says that (thing you don't care to read about how GW dice suck)"
Then you say, "He's a liar."
Then I say, "Well, I can never convince you more than that, so I won't even try?"
Then you say, "Sounds good, thread over."
And this entire conversation could've lasted a total of 4 posts?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Crimson wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
Pouncey wrote:
With Quantum Mechanics, doing the exact same thing with the exact same process can result in a different thing happening.
Indeed. And these quantum effects can and do affect the world. This is not in question. Quantum mechanics literally affect the behaviour of every atom in your body!
Maybe you should check into that assumption if you want to be making that argument.
Starting with finding out if everything in Quantum Mechanics is random, or just one part of it.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
I'm wondering what the point of asking for proof is at all if the only proof you are ever going to receive is something you're going to say was made-up anyways.
How hard it is to understand that if several people are saying that sky is blue and one is saying it is green, it is far more likely that the one person who says it is green is mistaken/lying? (Especially if he is linking you to a store to buy special headgear to protect you from deadly green-sky-rays.)
Maybe you should check into that assumption if you want to be making that argument.
I did.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
I'm wondering what the point of asking for proof is at all if the only proof you are ever going to receive is something you're going to say was made-up anyways.
How hard it is to understand that if several people are saying that sky is blue and one is saying it is green, it is far more likely that the one person who says it is green is mistaken/lying? (Especially if he is linking you to a store to buy special headgear to protect you from deadly green-sky-rays.)
When that one guy saying it's green is offering more proof than everyone saying it's blue combined, and he also says that the fact it's green instead of blue will never hurt me, but if I want to feel better I can buy this one thing people were already making for other reasons that also happens to make the green sky look blue when I look at it?
Probably I'm gonna believe that the sky is whatever color I already believe it to be, since color blindness exists and the 5 people insisting it's blue could all just be colorblind, and I already believed the idea that a color can exist only in the human mind without actually being real since the human brain does not only sense things that are real. Which in turn is something I already knew because I've hallucinated before.
Maybe you should check into that assumption if you want to be making that argument.
I did.
This is what Wikipedia's article "Randomness" says about Quantum Mechanics' effect on randomness, in its entirely
According to several standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, microscopic phenomena are objectively random.[6] That is, in an experiment that controls all causally relevant parameters, some aspects of the outcome still vary randomly. For example, if you place a single unstable atom in a controlled environment, you cannot predict how long it will take for the atom to decay—only the probability of decay in a given time.[7] Thus, quantum mechanics does not specify the outcome of individual experiments but only the probabilities. Hidden variable theories reject the view that nature contains irreducible randomness: such theories posit that in the processes that appear random, properties with a certain statistical distribution are at work behind the scenes, determining the outcome in each case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness#In_the_physical_sciences
Can you tell me what they said? I don't understand Wikipedia's more technical stuff, so I often don't understand sciency articles.
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Post by: BBAP
DakkaDakka; come for the swap shop, stay for the 6-page threads where people deploy quantum mechanics to support their misinterpretation of probability.
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Post by: Pouncey
 BBAP wrote:DakkaDakka; come for the swap shop, stay for the 6-page threads where people deploy quantum mechanics to support their misinterpretation of probability.
Hold up.
This is the first post in the thread to mention quantum mechanics at all.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/120/708883.page#9038329
It was not made by me.
And a conversation takes at least two people to have. I sure as hell have not been blathering on this whole time without at least one other person who is fully willing to be having the exact same conversation from the other side.
Don't put this thread on me. Anything I say is something anyone who replies to it could've chosen to ignore entirely and write off as some loon being a wacko on the Internet. They didn't. They chose to have this discussion with me.
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Post by: BBAP
Settle down, Beavis - I'm just sayin'. All this stuff about "quantum" and "random" seems a bit tangential to me if what we're discussing is the fairness of specific dice. I don't suppose anyone's considered dice pools? That way, if the diuce suck, they suck for everyone.
Also you said scale modelling doesn't work. Scale modelling works. It's how engineers test their designs before they build prototypes. Going from quantum to classical is not "scale modelling", though.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
When that one guy saying it's green is offering more proof than everyone saying it's blue combined,
Let's stop here. No he isn't. He says he has more proof, but anyone can say such things. I can say "I rolled a die million times and it always came up as six." If I did that would you believe dice always roll six?
Can you tell me what they said? I don't understand Wikipedia's more technical stuff, so I often don't understand sciency articles.
That certain quantum phenomena seem to be truly random, unless there are some completely unknown processes that we cannot perceive that govern them (this seems unlikely, but it is quantum mechanics, so who knows.)
Nothing in this implies that this base level randomness would somehow not affect the larger scale systems that are built upon that randomness. Automatically Appended Next Post: BBAP wrote:All this stuff about "quantum" and "random" seems a bit tangential to me if what we're discussing is the fairness of specific dice.
Certainly.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
BBAP wrote:Settle down, Beavis - I'm just sayin'. All this stuff about "quantum" and "random" seems a bit tangential to me if what we're discussing is the fairness of specific dice. I don't suppose anyone's considered dice pools? That way, if the diuce suck, they suck for everyone.
Well, the study that actually calls itself an analysis suggested that people should respond to this by just using the same dice, of any sort, for everything, regardless of what kind of dice they wanted to use.
The fact you roll more 1s than usual is actually beneficial in some pretty important and common things like all Leadership tests ever.
So the actual game is complicated enough that it's not a matter of simply determining how many of your attacks miss more often, you also have to include Leadership tests succeeding more often.
And probably when it comes to most people's gameplay, where nothing's even at stake, the difference to your gameplay between using Chessex dice for everything, and casino dice for everything, probably isn't worth the cost of getting different dice.
Also you said scale modelling doesn't work. Scale modelling works. It's how engineers test their designs before they build prototypes. Going from quantum to classical is not "scale modelling", though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
What other misunderstanding of physics led to this clip reel being a thing then? Automatically Appended Next Post: Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
When that one guy saying it's green is offering more proof than everyone saying it's blue combined,
Let's stop here. No he isn't. He says he has more proof, but anyone can say such things. I can say "I rolled a die million times and it always came up as six." If I did that would you believe dice always roll six?
And the people who tell me they rolled 10 dice a total of 2,000 times and came up with 16.9% 1s or so are offering... what proof exactly that would stop me from calling them a liar because they can't prove it?
Also, a million dice rolls all coming up 6s is so much more unlikely than 144,000 rolls coming up with an average of 26% 1s for GW and Chessex dice, 16.7% 1st for casino dice, and 19% 1s for straight edge board game dice (which are what GW dice would be if you didn't round off their corners, so they unrounded them by filling in the corners and checking it for near-perfect accuracy, and apparently if you just don't round off the corners of GW/Chessex dice, they roll 19% 1s, not 26%, because they also tested the 36 GW dice they unrounded 1,000 times each and yup, 19% 1s). I'm not even sure why you bothered making that comparison, the difference there in just the factors required, much less the actual probability, is beyond reasonable to offer as a comparison.
Can you tell me what they said? I don't understand Wikipedia's more technical stuff, so I often don't understand sciency articles.
That certain quantum phenomena seem to be truly random, unless there are some completely unknown processes that we cannot perceive that govern them (this seems unlikely, but it is quantum mechanics, so who knows.)
Nothing in this implies that this base level randomness would somehow not affect the larger scale systems that are built upon that randomness.
What part of your life is so random that you can do the exact same thing twice and get a different result each time and science's response to why that is is "Because it's random" instead of explaining the differences in what you did each time that make it so you get different results? No, rolling dice isn't one of them, because if you did the same roll the exact same way, you would get the same results. The human body just can't replicate its own motions accurately enough to do that. A machine probably could though.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BBAP wrote:All this stuff about "quantum" and "random" seems a bit tangential to me if what we're discussing is the fairness of specific dice.
Certainly.
Yeah, I didn't want to talk about the dice thing at all. Other people keep bringing it up.
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Post by: BBAP
Pouncey wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
What other misunderstanding of physics led to this clip reel being a thing then?
The rockets were going up, which suggests the physics were correct. The fact some span around themselves, collapsed under their own thrust, or deflagrated into a ball of flame, suggests problems with the design and construction of the machines.
The engineers were at fault, as engineers so often are.
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Post by: NightWinds5121
Is there any way to buy dice that roll 6s more often so I can use the Axe of Khorne to defeat players?
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Post by: Pouncey
BBAP wrote: Pouncey wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
What other misunderstanding of physics led to this clip reel being a thing then?
The rockets were going up, which suggests the physics were correct. The fact some span around themselves, collapsed under their own thrust, or deflagrated into a ball of flame, suggests problems with the design and construction of the machines.
The engineers were at fault, as engineers so often are.
Cool.
Like most of what I thought I knew, that assumption that I just expressed also turned out not to be true!
It's weird that I learn more about what I thought I knew actually being complete crap on Dakka than anywhere else, isn't it?
I'm learning a lot about real science by being embarrassingly wrong about real science on Dakka.
107340
Post by: BBAP
NightWinds5121 wrote:Is there any way to buy dice that roll 6s more often so I can use the Axe of Khorne to defeat players?
You can make your own. Just get an angle grinder, a lump of plastic, and some of the finest Citadel Layer paints. Grind the lump into a cube and paint six dots on all faces. Then the Axe will be unstoppable.
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Post by: Pouncey
NightWinds5121 wrote:Is there any way to buy dice that roll 6s more often so I can use the Axe of Khorne to defeat players?
Uhh, you could have GW dice where the side with 1 pip is instead a 6, and the side with 6 pips is instead a 1.
But that's sorta like like solving a Rubiks' Cube by just removing all the stickers and putting all the ones with the same color on the same side. Almost exactly like that, in fact.
Actually, if the common representation for 1 on a die involved 6 pips and the common representation for 6 on a die involved 1 pip, GW dice would be rolling more 6s than 1s without changing anything about the dice at all.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BBAP wrote:NightWinds5121 wrote:Is there any way to buy dice that roll 6s more often so I can use the Axe of Khorne to defeat players?
You can make your own. Just get an angle grinder, a lump of plastic, and some of the finest Citadel Layer paints. Grind the lump into a cube and paint six dots on all faces. Then the Axe will be unstoppable.
Or take a paint brush and some white and black paint to your white GW dice. White out the black pips with white paint. Add in black dots that look like the pips from the other side. See how long it takes anyone to notice.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
And the people who tell me they rolled 10 dice a total of 2,000 times and came up with 16.9% 1s or so are offering... what proof exactly that would stop me from calling them a liar because they can't prove it?
I have said this many times, you just refuse to listen. There are many people that have independently made the observation that the dice produce the expected 16 to 17 % of ones. It is unlikely that many people would lie this about this, especially in absence of clear motivation to do so. Or do you believe that there is some elaborate conspiracy to cover up the inferios quality of GW/Chessex dice?
Also, a million dice rolls all coming up 6s is so much more unlikely than 144,000 rolls coming up with an average of 26% 1s for GW and Chessex dice
No it is not if we assume that the result is due imbalance in the dice as is the case here.
Furthermore, you keep misquoting the articel, they say 29% not 26%. Not that it matters much, either result is implausible.
What part of your life is so random that you can do the exact same thing twice and get a different result each time and science's response to why that is is "Because it's random" instead of explaining the differences in what you did each time that make it so you get different results? No, rolling dice isn't one of them, because if you did the same roll the exact same way, you would get the same results. The human body just can't replicate its own motions accurately enough to do that. A machine probably could though.
I already told you, the effects of quantum randomness are most severe when we are dealing with a situation where a behaviour of small number of particles can over time create a large butterfly effect. In humans at least conception and early embryo development are such things. So are mutations in DNA which are key to the evolution as well as mutations which cause cancer.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
And the people who tell me they rolled 10 dice a total of 2,000 times and came up with 16.9% 1s or so are offering... what proof exactly that would stop me from calling them a liar because they can't prove it?
I have said this many times, you just refuse to listen. There are many people that have independently made the observation that the dice produce the expected 16 to 17 % of ones. It is unlikely that many people would lie this about this, especially in absence of clear motivation to do so. Or do you believe that there is some elaborate conspiracy to cover up the inferios quality of GW/Chessex dice?
No. I just think that if you add up the total number of dice rolls that many independent people made that I can't confirm ever happened, it doesn't add up to the 180,000 rolls made by one guy that I can't confirm ever happened.
The second guy is offering me the information given to him by casinos, dice manufacturers, and physicists to provide a plausible reason why his results even happened since he initially wanted to disprove the myth for all time, not confirm it.
The other people are basically just offering the explanation for their results that dice offered by the company that created Finecast couldn't possibly be manufactured badly enough to be biased in favor of any particular results and that anyone who claims to have proved otherwise is suggesting a conspiracy instead of the poor manufacturing in order to save money the previous guy is saying is the reason he was given from Chessex when he phoned them to ask why their dice rolled so poorly.
I think the people being unreasonable here, if we're objective about this, are actually the ones denying the article's validity.
Also, a million dice rolls all coming up 6s is so much more unlikely than 144,000 rolls coming up with an average of 26% 1s for GW and Chessex dice
No it is not if we assume that the result is due imbalance in the dice as is the case here.
Furthermore, you keep misquoting the articel, they say 29% not 26%. Not that it matters much, either result is implausible.
The article ACTUALLY says:
"Afterwards we calculated the results and the Chessex and GW dice averaged 29% ones. Mind you that this is an average and our high was 33 and our low was 23. We removed any statistical anomalies and came up with 29%."
Maybe you should read it.
What part of your life is so random that you can do the exact same thing twice and get a different result each time and science's response to why that is is "Because it's random" instead of explaining the differences in what you did each time that make it so you get different results? No, rolling dice isn't one of them, because if you did the same roll the exact same way, you would get the same results. The human body just can't replicate its own motions accurately enough to do that. A machine probably could though.
I already told you, the effects of quantum randomness are most severe when we are dealing with a situation where a behaviour of small number of particles can over time create a large butterfly effect. In humans at least conception and early embryo development are such things. So are mutations in DNA which are key to the evolution as well as mutations which cause cancer.
Yeah, we already knew evolution relied on random mutations before Quantum Mechanics was a thing at all. And we knew that human conception was pretty much a crapshoot anyways.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
No. I just think that if you add up the total number of dice rolls that many independent people made that I can't confirm ever happened, it doesn't add up to the 180,000 rolls made by one guy that I can't confirm ever happened.
But if that one person is lying none of those rolls happened!
And you really don't need that many rolls in the first place. If such a huge imbalance as claimed by this stydy really existed, it would be blindingly apparent with thousand rolls easily. But it isn't because it doesn't exist.
The second guy is offering me the information given to him by casinos, dice manufacturers, and physicists to provide a plausible reason why his results even happened since he initially wanted to disprove the myth for all time, not confirm it.
He says he is. I doubt casinos would really reveal data about their dice balance or that a dice manufacturer would freely admit that their product is flawed and unsuitable for the purpose it is created.
The other people are basically just offering the explanation for their results that dice offered by the company that created Finecast couldn't possibly be manufactured badly enough to be biased in favor of any particular results and that anyone who claims to have proved otherwise is suggesting a conspiracy instead of the poor manufacturing in order to save money the previous guy is saying is the reason he was given from Chessex when he phoned them to ask why their dice rolled so poorly.
Chessex would not admit making a gakky product in order to save money even if it were true. It is also obvious that the claim about saving plastic is not true. Plastic saved in corners and pips of one die does not come even close making a third die. And people are not saying that the dice are not flawed (at least not that much) to defend GW, they have observed this by themselves.
I think the people being unreasonable here, if we're objective about this, are actually the ones denying the article's validity.
No. You are enamoured by one internet article as it uses language that sounds sciency to you.
The article ACTUALLY says:
"Afterwards we calculated the results and the Chessex and GW dice averaged 29% ones. Mind you that this is an average and our high was 33 and our low was 23. We removed any statistical anomalies and came up with 29%."
Maybe you should read it.
I did, several times. Article says 29%, just like I said. Not 26%, like you said.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
No. I just think that if you add up the total number of dice rolls that many independent people made that I can't confirm ever happened, it doesn't add up to the 180,000 rolls made by one guy that I can't confirm ever happened.
But if that one person is lying none of those rolls happened!
And if, what, a high-end estimate of 100 other people are lying, none of the opposing rolls to that one guy ever happened?
I don't think it's impossible that 100 people all saying the same thing are wrong, much less lying.
And you really don't need that many rolls in the first place. If such a huge imbalance as claimed by this stydy really existed, it would be blindingly apparent with thousand rolls easily. But it isn't because it doesn't exist.
Why do you think this one guy decided to do 180,000 rolls about this in the first place?
He didn't invent the thing about GW dice rolling 1s more often than they should. He decided to disprove it, empirically, for all time, and ended up proving it instead. And he felt the need to disprove it strongly enough to have his students record the results of 180,000 dice rolls, for no other reason than because so many people believed it yet it had never been proven one way or another.
You don't remember that, because this article was posted on Dakka 10 years ago.
The second guy is offering me the information given to him by casinos, dice manufacturers, and physicists to provide a plausible reason why his results even happened since he initially wanted to disprove the myth for all time, not confirm it.
He says he is. I doubt casinos would really reveal data about their dice balance or that a dice manufacturer would freely admit that their product is flawed and unsuitable for the purpose it is created.
He said he had to prove to the casino he wasn't just some gambler looking for a way to cheat. He went through the effort needed to do so.
And he actually asked Chessex why they round the corners of their dice. They told him they save enough material to make it worth it. He probably didn't say that the reason he was asking was because he seemed to have proved that rounding the corners off Chessex dice unbalanced them incredibly badly.
The other people are basically just offering the explanation for their results that dice offered by the company that created Finecast couldn't possibly be manufactured badly enough to be biased in favor of any particular results and that anyone who claims to have proved otherwise is suggesting a conspiracy instead of the poor manufacturing in order to save money the previous guy is saying is the reason he was given from Chessex when he phoned them to ask why their dice rolled so poorly.
Chessex would not admit making a gakky product in order to save money even if it were true. It is also obvious that the claim about saving plastic is not true. Plastic saved in corners and pips of one die does not come even close making a third die. And people are not saying that the dice are not flawed (at least not that much) to defend GW, they have observed this by themselves.
He didn't ask them, "Why did you make a gakky product?" he probably instead asked them, "Why do you round the corners off your dice in the manufacturing process at all?" with the unspoken follow on, "Isn't it easier, cheaper and faster to make them more cubical and not need machines to round off the corners at all?"
Personally, I have observed some of my GW dice rolling a crapload of 1s when rolled one a time, but rolling more evenly when rolled with a handful of other dice.
I think the people being unreasonable here, if we're objective about this, are actually the ones denying the article's validity.
No. You are enamoured by one internet article as it uses language that sounds sciency to you.
Personally, I think you're in denial because you prefer your personal experience to trump things you don't believe can happen if you can't see them happening right in front of you.
The article ACTUALLY says:
"Afterwards we calculated the results and the Chessex and GW dice averaged 29% ones. Mind you that this is an average and our high was 33 and our low was 23. We removed any statistical anomalies and came up with 29%."
Maybe you should read it.
I did, several times. Article says 29%, just like I said. Not 26%, like you said.
It also says that's an average of the 36 GW and 36 Chessex dice. Each die rolled a number of 1s as low as 23% over 1,000 rolls, to as high as 33% over 1,000 rolls.
50012
Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
And if, what, a high-end estimate of 100 other people are lying, none of the opposing rolls to that one guy ever happened?
I don't think it's impossible that 100 people all saying the same thing are wrong, much less lying.
It is not impossible, it is just very very improbable. It is way more probable that the one person who comes up with an outlandish result is lying.
Why do you think this one guy decided to do 180,000 rolls about this in the first place?
I don't think he did.
He didn't invent the thing about GW dice rolling 1s more often than they should.
People say their dice roll more ones. Some might even believe it, most are just joking. But it is confirmation bias, people just remember the unusual results.
Personally, I have observed some of my GW dice rolling a crapload of 1s when rolled one a time, but rolling more evenly when rolled with a handful of other dice.
Unless you actually test that it means nothing, it is most likely just confirmation bias.
(As you remember, I did test it, the number of dice rolled did not affect the probability.)
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:Unless you actually test that it means nothing, it is most likely just confirmation bias.
(As you remember, I did test it, the number of dice rolled did not affect the probability.)
At some point during an actual 40k game a few years ago, the following actually happened between me and my regular opponent for the past 10-11 years:
Me: "Ugghh, this is gonna suck..."
Opponent: "What do you mean?"
Me: "I'm about to have to roll 5 single melta weapons from different squads all in a row."
Opponent: "So?"
Me: "So whenever I have to roll a lot of melta weapons in a row, I seem to always end up missing with almost all of them. I think some of my white dice roll 1s way more often than they should for some reason, and I always use white dice for melta weapons so I can tell which die is the melta one at any point and it helps to have a consistent system so it's easy to remember."
Opponent: "That's silly. Your dice are fine."
Me: "Let's find out."
Me rolling my next 5 melta attacks consecutively with the following results: 1, 1, 1, 2, 1.
Opponent: "Wow. Uh... Maybe you should just stop using white dice entirely and use one of the other 6 colors of identical dice you have."
Me: "Yeah, probably."
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Post by: Crimson
Indeed. That can happen and that's exactly how confirmation bias works. You remember that forever. You don't remember the thousands of times when your dice rolled perfectly average and boring results.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:Indeed. That can happen and that's exactly how confirmation bias works. You remember that forever. You don't remember the thousands of times when your dice rolled perfectly average and boring results.
To go back to an earlier argument, I'm going to show you just how much you misunderstand probability. I'm going to calculate the likelihood of 1,000,000 d6 rolls all coming up 6 on my computer's calculator by putting 6 to the power of 1 million. Also I'm probably going to have to ask Wolfram Alpha instead because I don't think my computer's calculator is that powerful.
Yup. 6^1000000 ends up with Invalid Input.
Okay, so asking Wolfram Alpha instead.
This is the page you get when you put 6 to the power of 1 million into Wolfram Alpha
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6%5E1000000
That number has 778,152 digits. That is the number of numbers the unlikelihood of that has.
However, I don't know how to calculate the unlikelihood of rolling 29% 1s instead of 16% 1s over the 72,000 rolls of GW and Chessex dice that averaged out to 29% 1s. I don't even know what to type into Wolfram Alpha. You claim to, since you said you know it's the same as 1 million dice all coming up 6, i.e. 6^1000000.
Link me the Wolfram Alpha page with your results. Understand now that every 1 off from 778,152 digits your number has, means you were off by a full order of magnitude.
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Post by: NInjatactiks
Honestly, if you're putting this much thought and stress into 40k, I feel like this is something you should quit. Tabletop games are supposed to be about being laid back and having something to do while you chill with your friends. It's not supposed to be something you lose sleep and get stressed over.
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Post by: Pouncey
NInjatactiks wrote:Honestly, if you're putting this much thought and stress into 40k, I feel like this is something you should quit. Tabletop games are supposed to be about being laid back and having something to do while you chill with your friends. It's not supposed to be something you lose sleep and get stressed over.
No, I get this stressed out by dealing with people who don't understand the things they're claiming to understand better than I do and are willing to argue with me over it. WH40k is unrelated to that. Playing WH40k is something I only get stressed out about when my dog snaps at me because he's blocking my path around the table to where I need to be standing to do stuff with the models.
Now please. Tell me whether those two line up in terms of unlikelihood.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Other things I could've pointed out to prove why it was a blatantly invalid comparison without even typing anything into a calculator:
Point out that the 72,000 rolls done on GW and Chessex dice with an average of 29% 1s is way, way less rolls than 1,000,000 rolls required to get 1,000,000 results of a 6.
Point out that getting 100% 6s is way, way more unlikely than getting 29% 1s, regardless of the total number of dice rolled, unless your sample size of rolls is 1, at which point you shouldn't be expressing your results as 29% anything.
Point out that rolling one die 1,000,000 times and getting 100% 6s would basically prove beyond a reasonable doubt that something in the rolling result is making that die unable to roll anything but 6s, and is most likely loaded to such an absurd degree it's nearly impossible to get any other result. Also you wasted a lot of time proving it because you would've proven it anyways long before reaching 1,000,000 results. I think you could even prove psychic powers were real if that were the only explanation for what was happening.And you only stopped at 1,000,000 because you wanted to say you did it a million times.
The fact anyone even proposed they were similar was a blatantly obvious indicator the person who said that didn't know anything about probability at all.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
To go back to an earlier argument, I'm going to show you just how much you misunderstand probability.
*sigh*
However, I don't know how to calculate the unlikelihood of rolling 29% 1s instead of 16% 1s over the 72,000 rolls of GW and Chessex dice that averaged out to 29% 1s. I don't even know what to type into Wolfram Alpha. You claim to, since you said you know it's the same as 1 million dice all coming up 6, i.e. 6^1000000.
Million actually balanced dice will never come up with all sixes nor do 72000 actually balanced dice come up with 29% as ones. Granted, the latter is vastly more probable than the former, but both are still unlikely enough that they're practically impossible.
But that's not the claim. The claim being made is that the dice are not properly balanced, that is the claim that the study makes that is the claim you make, and that was my joke all-sixes claim. So indeed, if the million dice are weighted so that they always roll six, then the probability of them rolling six is 100%*.
I merely said this because you were willing to accept and outlandish claim because the person making the claim said they rolled a lot of dice, and you justified your belief in this claim by the large number of dice purportedly being rolled. Logically it should follow, that you would accept any obviously non-sense claim as long as the person making it said that they had rolled more dice than the person making the previous bogus claim you believed.
* (granted, it is most likely impossible to so heavily imbalance a die, in a million rolls even a heavily weighted die would fail occasionally, but that's besides the point.)
------
But my actual claim is this: If the study was correct, and ones were indeed 1.8 times as likely as they should be, this would be instantly apparent even in a small test. All these people who have made their own tests with hundreds or thousands rolls would have easily noticed this. They didn't, it's not real.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
To go back to an earlier argument, I'm going to show you just how much you misunderstand probability.
*sigh*
However, I don't know how to calculate the unlikelihood of rolling 29% 1s instead of 16% 1s over the 72,000 rolls of GW and Chessex dice that averaged out to 29% 1s. I don't even know what to type into Wolfram Alpha. You claim to, since you said you know it's the same as 1 million dice all coming up 6, i.e. 6^1000000.
Million actually balanced dice will never come up with all sixes nor do 72000 actually balanced dice come up with 29% as ones. Granted, the latter is vastly more probable than the former, but both are still unlikely enough that they're practically impossible.
But that's not the claim. The claim being made is that the dice are not properly balanced, that is the claim that the study makes that is the claim you make, and that was my joke all-sixes claim. So indeed, if the million dice are weighted so that they always roll six, then the probability of them rolling six is 100%*.
I merely said this because you were willing to accept and outlandish claim because the person making the claim said they rolled a lot of dice, and you justified your belief in this claim by the large number of dice purportedly being rolled. Logically it should follow, that you would accept any obviously non-sense claim as long as the person making it said that they had rolled more dice than the person making the previous bogus claim you believed.
* (granted, it is most likely impossible to so heavily imbalance a die, in a million rolls even a heavily weighted die would fail occasionally, but that's besides the point.)
------
But my actual claim is this: If the study was correct, and ones were indeed 1.8 times as likely as they should be, this would be instantly apparent even in a small test. All these people who have made their own tests with hundreds or thousands rolls would have easily noticed this. They didn't, it's not real.
I just want to point this out, to end this argument once and for all. The fact everyone else's results are different from the article's doesn't even mean someone has to be lying. Everyone can be reporting exactly what they see, exactly as they see it, and no one is lying at all. That is in fact something science would expect to happen in this case.
That article, even if everything it said was true, doesn't mean that the GW dice being rolled in it weren't perfectly balanced to roll each result 1/6 of the time. You can roll casino dice, in the way a casino requires you to roll, 72,000 times in a row and get 29% of those rolls being a 1. It would be very unlikely to happen, but if you repeat something enough, you get streaks of consecutive results that are highly unlikely.
Even something as rare as rolling 1,000,000 d6s and having them come up 6 every time doesn't mean the dice are necessarily loaded. That can happen, and statistically speaking, according to the exact math I just said for calculating how often that would happen, 1 in (number with over 700,000 digits) times.
What science uses to prevent their perfectly valid studies from reporting a random fluke, is called a replication study. Everyone who's tried to replicate this article has found completely different results that conform to what we already know. That doesn't mean the original article's results were wrong, it just meant that what the article recorded happening, was a statistical fluke.
You don't call a fluke the result of someone lying their ass off. When you think you can show that the exploration study was a fluke, you don't call anyone a liar at any point. The article wouldn't be lying. Everything they said happened, would've actually happened, exactly as they said it. It was just a fluke that no one's been able to replicate at any point. Which is what science does replication studies precisely to find out - whether the original results were a fluke or not. Flukes. Are not. Lies. They are flukes.
The argument you should've tried to get the point across to me that the article's conclusion that GW dice are imbalanced was wrong, isn't that they were lying. It's that scientifically, the replication studies being done by hundreds of other individuals, whose results, while not as expansive in the scope of the study, were still statistically valid, to confirm the original article, were showing that the original study was unable to be replicated and thus was probably a fluke.
Calling the guy who did that original article a liar should never have figured into it at all. You don't even need to do so to suggest it's probably wrong about the thing it was saying about GW dice. The fact that other people who try to do similar things don't get similar results is all you needed, you just needed to phrase it the right way.
And like I said. This thread is the first time I ever saw anyone even disagree with that article. And yes, I am a bit of a slow learner, even the IQ test I had done at a psychiatric evaluation said so. I am a very, very slow learner. My processing speed IQ (i.e. how quickly I learn) is an 86. That is between mental retardation and the absolute low end of normal, in a 10-point category between the two. So please understand if took me this long to finally learn that I might've been wrong, I am unable to learn at even a normal speed so you're probably going to have to explain things to me a lot. Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, if you ever want a completely undeniable argument to use against me the next time I decide to mention that earlier thing about the time I thought I could control the roll of dice, I'll give it to you, right now. This is a counter-argument that I know I cannot deny is an absolute counter-argument, whose logic even I cannot deny, to the point where there is something which I am totally unwilling to mention at any point where this fact is likely being considered inside the mind of someone I am trying to convince the thing I said about being able to roll the same die 15 times and get the result I wanted each time. Because I absolutely believe that the thing I am about to reveal will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to any objective person, including myself, that my apparent claim about "mind powers" is not a thing that actually happened, despite happening right in front of me.
I am a schizophrenic.
I was still incredibly sick when that entire thing happened. Either I hadn't been diagnosed yet or I was so early in recovery I was still quite sick.
No one was even home when I rolled those dice. No one ever saw me do it who I could ask if it ever happened.
One of the things schizophrenia can do is cause you to see one thing, as another thing. That's called an illusion if you want to look it up, and yes, it is different from a hallucination where you see things that aren't there at all.
One of the other things about schizophrenia is that the symptoms fit into reality perfectly. Schizophrenics can't tell when they're hallucinating, and often those hallucinations blend into reality so much there are things I have seen when I was most ill where I'm pretty sure I hallucinated in there somewhere, but just from my memory I can't tell which part, just that two things didn't fit together that should have but I don't know which part was real and which part wasn't. Also, both things may not have been real.
One of the other things about schizophrenia is that it causes you to believe things that most people accept as not being true. For example, that you can control the results of dice rolls with your mind.
So even I, at some level, fully believe that the most likely explanation anyone can offer for why I was apparently able to roll 15 dice in a row the way I wanted to, is that I rolled 15 dice in a row and saw the results I was expecting, even though another human being who watched me do it would've seen me roll a random set of results including numerous scatter results.
Why did I bother arguing differently earlier?
Because part of the reason I type such weird posts is that writing things out is how I think things through. You are literally seeing my reasoning in-progress as I try to understand things when you read my posts. And what I just said there is not something I have ever described in full before. To anyone. Ever. Before then, that idea existed as a vague concept in my mind that if someone were able to link me being a schizophrenic with my apparent mind-dice powers with calling the latter to be BS. That's basically the extent of the entirety of this post where I explain why that thing I argued for a while about earlier on is probably BS. I didn't know it was BS then. I do now. And in the future, because I typed all this out, I won't ever be saying I can control the results of dice with my mind anymore, not because I'll get an argument, but because I don't believe it even happened at all anymore. Automatically Appended Next Post: I actually have a more plausible explanation than "random fluke" to explain why no one can replicate it.
That article was written 10 years ago.
Maybe GW and Chessex heard about it and started making their dice better since then?
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Post by: Crimson
Ok, thank you for your honesty.
I too first considered the random fluke explanation, but after seeing the purported scale of the experiment, I realised how mind-bogglingly unlikely it would be.
Often when scientific experiments give really strange results, it turns out that there has been some error in how the experiment has been conducted. However, considering how relatively straight-forward testing the dice is, I really cannot come up with any experimental error that would explain the results. Of course it is possible that such could exist and I'm just not clever enough to figure out what it could be.
As for older dice being faulty or there being faulty batches of dice, I considered that too. This article has been around for long time and people have reported results contradicting the article for a long time. Had such faulty dice indeed existed in the past, surely some of the people doing their own tests would have them too? Hell, it is quite possible that the dice I used for my tests are over ten years old. I've played 40K since the second edition, and while the dice I used definitely are not that old they're not new either. I cannot remember when I got them. So while faulty batches explanation is far more likely than the random fluke explanation it is still really not that likely.
So maybe I'm a cynic, but to me a hoax seems like most likely explanation. The motive is in the article, to sell the the 'perfect' dice. This sort of thing is hardly uncommon, it happens all the time. So whilst I certainly cannot say that this is definitely what's going on here, to me it seems like the most likely explanation.
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Post by: Yarium
I have one possible explanation that could explain a legitimately faulty test; the dice may not have been "rolled" in a conventional way, but rather mechanically agitated. More like being shaken rather than rolled. In that case, smaller differences in weight distribution would have an exaggerated effect.
To give an analogy, image a bucket of rocks and a bag of sand being poured into an empty bucket. If I pour them both in at the same time, there will be a "random" distribution of sand, rocks, and air pockets. However, if I vibrate and agitate the bucket I'm pouring both into, I'll end up with more sand on the bottom and less air pockets (which would be noticeable by having the bucket appear to be less full). The small imperfections in the shape and distribution of the mixture would have an exaggerated effect.
In this way, one could "coax" miniscule imperfections that normally have no nominally apparent bearing on the standard distribution to be exaggerated into appearing to be a much larger effect. Now, the link in the dakka article links to a non-existent page, so I can't confirm their methodology, but I can imagine that in order to keep dice rolls separate and to roll so many dice, that a tray constructed of small spaces for these dice may have been set up separately and independently from each other to allow for large numbers of individual dice and rolls to be made. Reading the dakka article, it appears that's what was done (edit: specifically, he said he made little plastic spaces in order to track individual dice, which would suggest this kind of methodology, but doesn't confirm it), and this could definitely allow for these conditions.
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Post by: cuda1179
I think the reason dice roll so bad is because companies are more interested in making the dice look "pretty" that to roll well.
Due to construction methods of "pretty" dice they are not true cubes. They can be different dimensions on the X,Y, and Z axis. some dice are as much as 3% wider in one dimension than another. In addition some of their sides are not parallel to the opposing side.
Also, as most dice are made from injection molded plastic there is a dimple on one side (usually the one side) were the plastic is injected into the dice-mold. This is later trimmed off, but often a slight bump is still present. This is enough to bounce the one side up off a bottom facing. That makes a 1-roll more probable, which is what I think is happening with GW dice.
Companies also put their dice into a polishing machine. This makes them smooth, but also rounds the sides and corners to varying degrees.
Some of the worst offenders are the "clear" dice that have an ornamentation inside. These dice are rarely balanced correctly.
I can't remember the guy or his company, but he basically set out to make some of the best dice out there for true randomness. The best way of course is to make dice from milled metal, but that's expensive as heck. He instead chose to make "ugly" dice that are not polished. The "fill nipple" is trimmed off and ensured to not have a bump, but is not polished out either.
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Post by: Crimson
Yarium wrote:I have one possible explanation that could explain a legitimately faulty test; the dice may not have been "rolled" in a conventional way, but rather mechanically agitated. More like being shaken rather than rolled. In that case, smaller differences in weight distribution would have an exaggerated effect.
To give an analogy, image a bucket of rocks and a bag of sand being poured into an empty bucket. If I pour them both in at the same time, there will be a "random" distribution of sand, rocks, and air pockets. However, if I vibrate and agitate the bucket I'm pouring both into, I'll end up with more sand on the bottom and less air pockets (which would be noticeable by having the bucket appear to be less full). The small imperfections in the shape and distribution of the mixture would have an exaggerated effect.
In this way, one could "coax" miniscule imperfections that normally have no nominally apparent bearing on the standard distribution to be exaggerated into appearing to be a much larger effect. Now, the link in the dakka article links to a non-existent page, so I can't confirm their methodology, but I can imagine that in order to keep dice rolls separate and to roll so many dice, that a tray constructed of small spaces for these dice may have been set up separately and independently from each other to allow for large numbers of individual dice and rolls to be made. Reading the dakka article, it appears that's what was done (edit: specifically, he said he made little plastic spaces in order to track individual dice, which would suggest this kind of methodology, but doesn't confirm it), and this could definitely allow for these conditions.
That actually sounds somewhat plausible. I am not sure I am convinced that such a method could produce such a large error, but maybe it is possible. Good thinking in any case.
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Post by: Yarium
One way we could find out, if we had the original data, would be to see if other dice had preferential sides as well. The more the individual dice show preference towards certain rolls (not just 1) the more likely this potential mistake in the methodology would become.
EDIT: Or that the dice that did roll 1s very consistently rolled 1s.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Yarium wrote:I have one possible explanation that could explain a legitimately faulty test; the dice may not have been "rolled" in a conventional way, but rather mechanically agitated. More like being shaken rather than rolled. In that case, smaller differences in weight distribution would have an exaggerated effect.
To give an analogy, image a bucket of rocks and a bag of sand being poured into an empty bucket. If I pour them both in at the same time, there will be a "random" distribution of sand, rocks, and air pockets. However, if I vibrate and agitate the bucket I'm pouring both into, I'll end up with more sand on the bottom and less air pockets (which would be noticeable by having the bucket appear to be less full). The small imperfections in the shape and distribution of the mixture would have an exaggerated effect.
In this way, one could "coax" miniscule imperfections that normally have no nominally apparent bearing on the standard distribution to be exaggerated into appearing to be a much larger effect. Now, the link in the dakka article links to a non-existent page, so I can't confirm their methodology, but I can imagine that in order to keep dice rolls separate and to roll so many dice, that a tray constructed of small spaces for these dice may have been set up separately and independently from each other to allow for large numbers of individual dice and rolls to be made. Reading the dakka article, it appears that's what was done (edit: specifically, he said he made little plastic spaces in order to track individual dice, which would suggest this kind of methodology, but doesn't confirm it), and this could definitely allow for these conditions.
That actually sounds somewhat plausible. I am not sure I am convinced that such a method could produce such a large error, but maybe it is possible. Good thinking in any case.
Well, the error wasn't always 29% 1s. Some individual dice were as low as 23% 1s, others were as high as 33% 1s. I do admit that time-saving measures may have been employed which may have skewed the results though.
I wonder though. Apparently he then bought a new package of GW dice and rebuilt the corners with his lab's equipment, to be like the dice that had originally rolled 19% 1s. Then another 36,000 total rolls were made with GW dice whose corners had been rebuilt, and ended up with 19% 1s as a result.
Which means that the guy thinks that cutting off the corners of GW and Chessex dice is what unbalanced them, and simply not having done so would result in some decently-fair dice where he would've concluded from his original 72,000 GW/Chessex results turning out with 19% 1s, that GW dice are just as fair as other standard gaming dice, so it was all in everyone's heads the whole time.
So I have to ask, if not to save money by saving material, why exactly do GW and Chessex dice have their corners shaved off? What advantage does that provide to spend money on machines to do that instead of just leaving them with square edges?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Yarium wrote:One way we could find out, if we had the original data, would be to see if other dice had preferential sides as well. The more the individual dice show preference towards certain rolls (not just 1) the more likely this potential mistake in the methodology would become.
EDIT: Or that the dice that did roll 1s very consistently rolled 1s.
Yeah, I did note that the Dakka article mentioned no other results but 1s.
Also, even the dice that rolled twice as many 1s as normal still usually didn't roll a 1 and were twice as likely to not roll a 1 than they were to roll a 1.
How consistent is "very consistent" to you?
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Post by: Yarium
I'm not a scientist so i couldn't say exactly. Best i could say is that it depends on the sample size. Generally though I'd say any die that rolls a 1 more than 1 standard deviations from the mean is suspect, and anything more than 1.5 would be almost definitely mean that something is wrong.
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Post by: Pouncey
Yarium wrote:I'm not a scientist so i couldn't say exactly. Best i could say is that it depends on the sample size. Generally though I'd say any die that rolls a 1 more than 1 standard deviations from the mean is suspect, and anything more than 1.5 would be almost definitely mean that something is wrong.
I don't know what a standard deviation is, but I'm gonna guess it's doubling the odds of rolling a 1 in this case.
To which I say to you, 33% is less than double 16.7%.
33% is the highest any individual die in that article rolled 1s.
So basically the furthest deviation the article suggested was happening with GW/Chessex dice, from fair dice, was less than doubling the odds of rolling a 1.
The lowest on GW/Chessex dice was 23%, which is only 6.3% higher 1s than you would get from the 16.7% of 1s you normally roll with fair dice. Less than 1/3 more 1s than normal.
And the article basically said that if GW and Chessex stopped shaving the corners off their dice they'd roll as fairly as any other dice you're likely to be able to buy at your local gaming stores.
The article NEVER said that GW dice even MOSTLY roll 1s, much less always roll 1s. It said that GW dice roll somewhere between a third extra and double the number of 1s you'd get while rolling at a casino.
Every 100 rolls with the odds the article was saying GW and Chessex dice had with their corners shaved off, would get you somewhere between 23 and 33 1s instead of 16 or 17, depending on which dice you actually use from your collection to make those rolls.
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Post by: Crimson
The shape of the corners should have absolutely on effect on the randomness of the dice, as long as every corner is same the shape.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey, the study you keep referring to is not conclusive enough to prove that Chessex and GW dice are unbalanced and biased towards rolling a 1 because it has too small of a sample size. Not of sample size of rolls, but a sample size of the physical dice. The tester only used 36 dice from each variant (GW, Chessex, Casino, cornered) for a 144 dice total. Considering that each company probably manufactures hundreds of thousands of dice (if not millions) to test ONLY 36 dice is a ridiculously low sample size (that is only 0.003% of the dice tested at most)
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:The shape of the corners should have absolutely on effect on the randomness of the dice, as long as every corner is same the shape.
I forget what the article said about that, but apparently yeah, it does make a difference.
He even got an explanation from one point from a physicist who called bullgak on the fact he was getting more 1s than more 6s because both of them thought they should be rolling more 6s given how they were unbalaced. Loaded dice put the heaviest side on the bottom to weigh it down, so the heaviest side of a die with pips is the 1, since it has the fewest pips, should mean 6s came up.
After calling bullgak and trying to replicate the results himself, the physicist came back to him and said that the dice were so light that the mass lost from those extra pips was probably being outweighed by the centrifugal force of the die spinning as it rolled.
We're basically talking about a guy who, if what he's saying is true, arranged a total of 180,000 dice rolls to show the results being off was just in everyone's head, ended up proving they weren't, and phoned a casino, a dice manufacturer, and asked a physicist in his university for explanations of what he ended up showing.
I don't know WHY that is somehow less valid than some random person telling me they rolled 600 dice and then telling me they came up with a normal number of 1s.
You're not even offering me a combined total of more possibly-fake dice rolls than the number of possibly-fake dice rolls the thing you're trying to prove wrong with those possibly-fake dice rolls!
You're basically offering me less insubstantiated evidence than the insubstantiated evidence you're trying to prove wrong, without any sort of valid explanation, and expecting me to take what you say that I can't prove, over what someone else says that I also can't prove, essentially just because it's YOU saying it and not HIM.
Why should I believe what you're saying is true when I can't prove it happened any more than I can prove the thing that is obviously more statisticcally valid than what you're saying, and you're just offering me your own random guesswork which is obviously incredibly flawed given what I showed you on a recent page about the thing one of you said, as an explanation, over the things that casinos, dice manufacturers and physicists are saying about the randomness of dice rolls.
The reason I don't believe the article is wrong yet is that you haven't actually offered as much evidence as it has yet. Automatically Appended Next Post: CrownAxe wrote:Pouncey, the study you keep referring to is not conclusive enough to prove that Chessex and GW dice are unbalanced and biased towards rolling a 1 because it has too small of a sample size. Not of sample size of rolls, but a sample size of the physical dice. The tester only used 36 dice from each variant ( GW, Chessex, Casino, cornered) for a 144 dice total. Considering that each company probably manufactures hundreds of thousands of dice (if not millions) to test ONLY 36 dice is a ridiculously low sample size (that is only 0.003% of the dice tested at most)
They tested 36 GW and 36 Chessex dice. 72 dice. All straight out of the package that was bought for this purpose only.
Then it rolled them 1,000 times each. 72,000 rolls.
Each die rolled at least 23% 1s. ALL 72 dice were unbalanced. Not even ONE was not.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Yes the article established that those 72 dice were unbalanced. But how is testing 72 dice out of a million proof that all million dice are unbalanced?
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Post by: Crimson
For there to be imbalance, there absolutely has to be some irregularity in either shape or in density. If the all sides of the die are symmetrical and the die is of uniform density it has to be in balance. If all corners are equally rounded the object is balanced. Rounding corners may introduce imbalance only if the corners are unevenly rounded.
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Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote:Yes the article established that those 72 dice were unbalanced. But how is testing 72 dice out of a million proof that all million dice are unbalanced?
You do realize that the people who provide statistics for what people in one area think, don't actually ask each person in that area, right? Hell, they don't even ask the vast majority of those people. If you saw something that said that 52% of Americans believe that (thing) is real, they probably asked only about a thousand people in America in total before saying that. For a ccountry of, what, three hundred million?
72 dice ALL being unbalanced is 100% of the 72 dice tested. Tell me how many dice need to be unbalanced across a million dice boxes for buying two random boxes of dice off a shelf to give you two boxes where all the dice are unbalanced to be a likely possibility of random chance.
I'll give you a hint. The odds of these 72 dice being the ONLY unbalanced dice out there was incredibly low. There were and are plenty more like them out there.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
The is why the sample is too small. An single production run having an error is bound to happen (human error after all). It's no indicitive of all dice as a whole.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:For there to be imbalance, there absolutely has to be some irregularity in either shape or in density. If the all sides of the die are symmetrical and the die is of uniform density it has to be in balance. If all corners are equally rounded the object is balanced. Rounding corners may introduce imbalance only if the corners are unevenly rounded.
READ. THE. ARTICLE. ITSELF.
They CUT the dice open. They found AIR BUBBLES and SEEDS inside ALL GW and Chessex dice. The air bubbles CORRELATED to HOW UNBALANCED each die WAS.
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Post by: Crimson
[quote=Pouncey 708883 9040449 c4dcc7aba1b12bbf127c68af0ea833bd.png
READ. THE. ARTICLE. ITSELF.
They CUT the dice open. They found AIR BUBBLES and SEEDS inside ALL GW and Chessex dice. The air bubbles CORRELATED to HOW UNBALANCED each die WAS.
I did. Yes, those are exactly the sort of things that can cause imbalance. Rounded corners are not.
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Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote:Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
They're NOT all the same. They rolled different distributions of 1s.
The is why the sample is too small. An single production run having an error is bound to happen (human error after all). It's no indicitive of all dice as a whole.
A single production run does not produce only one box of dice.
HOW MANY dice are you saying were in this production run, exactly?
How many dice are you saying are like this? Automatically Appended Next Post: Crimson wrote:[quote=Pouncey 708883 9040449 c4dcc7aba1b12bbf127c68af0ea833bd.png
READ. THE. ARTICLE. ITSELF.
They CUT the dice open. They found AIR BUBBLES and SEEDS inside ALL GW and Chessex dice. The air bubbles CORRELATED to HOW UNBALANCED each die WAS.
I did. Yes, those are exactly the sort of things that can cause imbalance. Rounded corners are not.
Please quote for me the part of the article where he attempted to explain why the rounded corners caused them to be unbalanced while having square corners made them not unbalanced.
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Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
They're NOT all the same. They rolled different distributions of 1s.
All of which is within a reasonable margin of error of each other and all of which had the same skewed results. They are all functionally the same
The is why the sample is too small. An single production run having an error is bound to happen (human error after all). It's no indicitive of all dice as a whole.
A single production run does not produce only one box of dice.
HOW MANY dice are you saying were in this production run, exactly?
How many dice are you saying are like this?
There is no way to know with out contacting Chessex/ GW and asking them how much dice they produce at a time and in total
But you can be sure that they didn't do all of there dice in a single production run. It's safe to say they've done a couple hundred at least and the study only tested one of them. They is not statistically conclussive
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Post by: Crimson
If we for the moment pretend that the part about melting more plastic to the dice and building the corners actually happened and it improved the balance, the reason would be that the corners were originally unevenly rounded (for some bizarre reason same way uneven on all the dice) and the new sharper corners were more symmetrical. The sharpness of the corners is not the thing that matters, it is the symmetry.
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Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
They're NOT all the same. They rolled different distributions of 1s.
All of which is within a reasonable margin of error of each other and all of which had the same skewed results. They are all functionally the same
For the love of god.
You should probably know something about probability if you're gonna be having this discussion with me. Like, anything at all.
The is why the sample is too small. An single production run having an error is bound to happen (human error after all). It's no indicitive of all dice as a whole.
A single production run does not produce only one box of dice.
HOW MANY dice are you saying were in this production run, exactly?
How many dice are you saying are like this?
There is no way to know with out contacting Chessex/ GW and asking them how much dice they produce at a time and in total
But you can be sure that they didn't do all of there dice in a single production run. It's safe to say they've done a couple hundred at least and the study only tested one of them. They is not statistically conclussive
Then PHONE THEM AND ASK.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Crimson wrote:If we for the moment pretend that the part about melting more plastic to the dice and building the corners actually happened and it improved the balance, the reason would be that the corners were originally unevenly rounded (for some bizarre reason same way uneven on all the dice) and the new sharper corners were more symmetrical. The sharpness of the corners is not the thing that matters, it is the symmetry.
Pretend?
What does the article tell you the guy had at his disposal in terms of lab equipment near the start of the article?
This is why I say you didn't even read the article. You CLEARLY didn't. You ask about things the article already answered.
READ THE DAMNED THING.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
They're NOT all the same. They rolled different distributions of 1s.
All of which is within a reasonable margin of error of each other and all of which had the same skewed results. They are all functionally the same
For the love of god. You should probably know something about probability if you're gonna be having this discussion with me. Like, anything at all.
I have a year's worth of statistics that i studied when i was in college. I pretty sure that's more then what' you've studied. The fact that you think this single study is conclusive show's that you don't actually understand what you are talking about. Which considering how our discussion on telepathy went this wouldn't be the first time. The is why the sample is too small. An single production run having an error is bound to happen (human error after all). It's no indicitive of all dice as a whole.
A single production run does not produce only one box of dice. HOW MANY dice are you saying were in this production run, exactly? How many dice are you saying are like this?
There is no way to know with out contacting Chessex/ GW and asking them how much dice they produce at a time and in total But you can be sure that they didn't do all of there dice in a single production run. It's safe to say they've done a couple hundred at least and the study only tested one of them. They is not statistically conclussive
Then PHONE THEM AND ASK.
I'm not the one trying to claim that a single study with such a small sample size is conclusive
50012
Post by: Crimson
I read it, I don't believe it. I find it unlikely that any of these tests actually happened.
20983
Post by: Ratius
Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
They're NOT all the same. They rolled different distributions of 1s.
All of which is within a reasonable margin of error of each other and all of which had the same skewed results. They are all functionally the same
For the love of god.
You should probably know something about probability if you're gonna be having this discussion with me. Like, anything at all.
I have a year's worth of statistics that i studied when i was in college. I pretty sure that's more then what' you've studied.
The fact that you think this single study is conclusive show's that you don't actually understand what you are talking about. Which considering how our discussion on telepathy went this wouldn't be the first time.
Crown - I think Pounceys very interesting if a tiny touch eccentric. But do not get into probability weighted distribution curve debates with him.
Aint listening bro.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Ratius wrote: Actually since they all came from the same box it would be odd if they weren't all the same, Being from the same package means they came from the same single production run and if that production run had an error in it they would all have it.
They're NOT all the same. They rolled different distributions of 1s.
All of which is within a reasonable margin of error of each other and all of which had the same skewed results. They are all functionally the same
For the love of god.
You should probably know something about probability if you're gonna be having this discussion with me. Like, anything at all.
I have a year's worth of statistics that i studied when i was in college. I pretty sure that's more then what' you've studied.
The fact that you think this single study is conclusive show's that you don't actually understand what you are talking about. Which considering how our discussion on telepathy went this wouldn't be the first time.
Crown - I think Pounceys very interesting if a tiny touch eccentric. But do not get into probability weighted distribution curve debates with him.
Aint listening bro.
Obviously. My knowledge of probability is mostly intuitive, it doesn't include any actual training.
But I'm dealing with you guys who are saying things like 29% of 72,000 rolls are 1s is equally as unlikely as 100% of 1,000,000 rolls being 6s, and even I know that's completely wrong just from the numbers you're comparing, while you guys seem to think it's perfectly okay to say and defend as a valid comparison!
So I know I don't know much, but I know YOU guys know WAY less than I do since you prove it by trying to defend statements like, "29% of 72,000 rolls are 1s is equally as unlikely as 100% of 1,000,000 rolls being 6s," after having said such an obviously absurd thing in the first place!
Honestly, even if I fully accept that just these 72 dice are imbalances and none others were, the only thing that meant those dice were used by the article and not every game I have ever played since 2006 is that he bought them and I didn't! Automatically Appended Next Post: CrownAxe wrote:I'm not the one trying to claim that a single study with such a small sample size is conclusive
Correct. The guy in the article is. So when he needed Chessex to answer a question about why they manufactured their dice a certain way, he picked up the phone and called them to ask.
Now realize that what I replied to there was you saying:
"There is no way to know with out contacting Chessex/ GW and asking them how much dice they produce at a time and in total
But you can be sure that they didn't do all of there dice in a single production run. It's safe to say they've done a couple hundred at least and the study only tested one of them. They is not statistically conclussive"
That is something YOU are trying to prove. Not ME. Not the ARTICLE. YOU.
Also, if you want to compare number of dice rolled, do you want me to go a few pages earlier in this thread and find people arguing AGAINST the article who talk about rolling 10 dice 200 times? Automatically Appended Next Post: CrownAxe wrote:Which considering how our discussion on telepathy went this wouldn't be the first time.
You know when I stopped arguing that? When I was proved wrong.
I am one of the most honest people on this board. I don't lie, since I don't ever see the point of lying about things that don't matter anyways.
When I am proved wrong about something in a way I accept as meaning I am wrong, I stop saying the wrong things I am saying. I don't argue points for no reason. I don't say things I know are wrong.
And you, have not proved this article wrong in my eyes. You are saying things about probability that I know are wrong from being able to compare two different numbers to each other and coming to the conclusion they are incredibly different.
So I don't believe you know probability better than I do. You have not proved to me that the article is wrong, and often I know you haven't read large parts of it because you make references to things that are already covered in the article.
I am an intellectually honest person who doesn't believe in lying on the Internet. And I think you are wrong. Automatically Appended Next Post: Crimson wrote:I read it, I don't believe it. I find it unlikely that any of these tests actually happened.
"I don't believe you, so you're lying."
That is your argument to ignore 72,000 dice rolls that show GW and Chessex dice are poorly-made.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
You are saying things about probability that I know are wrong from being able to compare two different numbers to each other and coming to the conclusion they are incredibly different.
I would say the same thing about you. You are saying things about probability that I know are wrong. And I know they're wrong because I studied statistics for a year. You just said yourself that your understanding of probability is mostly intuitive and doesn't include any actual training. How can't you truly say you know what you are talking about when you haven't actually learned about the subject at hand?
That's what I was referring to when i brought the telepathy debate. You yourself said that you and other people who don't fully understand the science of the rat experiment called it telepathy. That is the same thing here. You and people who don't understand statistics are calling this article proof. When it is not proof, just like the rat experiment is not telepathy.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Honestly, here's how you prove to me that the article is probably lying. I will prove it to you without even mentioning the results at all.
Why does this article involve 36 GW dice and not 25? GW dice are sold in cubes of 27, 2 of which are scatter dice. What dice were added to this to give him an extra 11 GW dice? What is so special about having 36 of each that GW dice were either added to the box he grabbed, or excluded from the 2 boxes he grabbed? Why not just include all of the GW dice you bought to test this and no more?
And the only answer I can come up with is because human brains perceive evenness as good, so he was willing to have 36 of each be the results he was sharing mean the results would be more acceptable. And that's a terrible way to do any sort of analysis that you are excluding or adding things to the test, just to make it happen. So you're probably full of it about something.
You DON'T prove something is wrong by just saying you don't believe it, so it's wrong. You DON'T prove dice being unbalanced is impossible by saying that it would require those dice to be unbalanced physically because yes, if a die were rolling extra 1s, it would have to be unbalanced physically since a die's physical characteristics affect how it rolls and changing physical things about it is the only way to unbalance it.
You DON'T prove the article is wrong by saying the manufacturing process would have to be defective when GW made Finecast, one of the most defective products known to wargaming.
You DO prove to me that the article is wrong by pointing out things about it that mean it cannot be true.
You DON'T prove to me that the article is wrong by offering your word that fewer rolls were being made than it said it did and those fewer rolls mean it's wrong as proof it is wrong.
And frankly, I'm wondering why you guys started arguing about it again after a page or two ago when I said its results were probably a fluke that meant GW dice were actually balanced like you were saying they were. Why did you start arguing with me again after I said you were right? Do you just like to argue or something?
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
I'm not trying to prove the article is lying. In fact I think those 72 dice are in fact unbalanced.
I'm saying that single article is not enough evidence to claim that Chessex and GW dice are on the whole unbalanced. A basic understanding on manufacturing and producing goods is enough to prove that it's sample size is too small to be conclusive.
In science you can't prove any hypothesis with a single study, you have to have multiple people repeat that experiment to verify those findings. That has not be done with this article.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote:I'm not trying to prove the article is lying. In fact I think those 72 dice are in fact unbalanced.
I'm saying that single article is not enough evidence to claim that Chessex and GW dice are on the whole unbalanced. A basic understanding on manufacturing and producing goods is enough to prove that it's sample size is too small to be conclusive.
In science you can't prove any hypothesis with a single study, you have to have multiple people repeat that experiment to verify those findings. That has not be done with this article.
Okay. How many Chessex and GW dice do you think are unbalanced then? Because this article seems to suggest the answer is "at least 72" not "0."
And it seems to have proved that at least 72 dice are unbalanced by testing a total of 72 dice.
Also, given what the study required to be available to the person doing it, expecting anyone to ever even be able to attempt to replicate it is unreasonable.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:I'm not trying to prove the article is lying. In fact I think those 72 dice are in fact unbalanced. I'm saying that single article is not enough evidence to claim that Chessex and GW dice are on the whole unbalanced. A basic understanding on manufacturing and producing goods is enough to prove that it's sample size is too small to be conclusive. In science you can't prove any hypothesis with a single study, you have to have multiple people repeat that experiment to verify those findings. That has not be done with this article.
Okay. How many Chessex and GW dice do you think are unbalanced then? Because this article seems to suggest the answer is "at least 72" not "0."
I never said 0 and doesn't need to be 0. If 99% of all dice were balanced that would be excellent and statistically indistinguishable from 100% balanced dice. But 99% of 1 million dice still means you have 10000 dice that are unbalanced. That's why a person testing only 72 dice from a single pack is not statistically significant because that is a small number when compared to 10000 unbalanced dice and that number is insignificantly small when compared. to the 990000 balanced dice Automatically Appended Next Post: How is it unreasonable to expect someone to replicate an experiment someone has already done? If one person can do it another person can repeat it. We aren't splitting the atom here.
43778
Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:I'm not trying to prove the article is lying. In fact I think those 72 dice are in fact unbalanced.
I'm saying that single article is not enough evidence to claim that Chessex and GW dice are on the whole unbalanced. A basic understanding on manufacturing and producing goods is enough to prove that it's sample size is too small to be conclusive.
In science you can't prove any hypothesis with a single study, you have to have multiple people repeat that experiment to verify those findings. That has not be done with this article.
Okay. How many Chessex and GW dice do you think are unbalanced then? Because this article seems to suggest the answer is "at least 72" not "0."
I never said 0 and doesn't need to be 0. If 99% of all dice were balanced that would be excellent and statistically indistinguishable from 100% balanced dice. But 99% of 1 million dice still means you have 10000 dice that are unbalanced. That's why a person testing only 72 dice from a single pack is not statistically significant because that is a small number when compared to 10000 unbalanced dice and that number is insignificantly small when compared. to the 990000 balanced dice
You remember earlier in this thread when I talked about how my white GW dice seemed to roll way more 1s than they should so I invented the idea of ballast dice?
Is it possible that the 10 or so white dice in my collection of at least 200 or so GW/Chessex dice, that roll that many more 1s than normal are actually so poorly manufactured that I could probably say I have dice in my collection that are balanced even worse than the worst offenders in the study, in my personal collection? Even though the rest of my collection of dice seem to roll totally fine all the time?
Because the fact that 5% of my GW/Chessex dice are unbalanced severely is messing up my gameplay badly.
To which I must ask.
Does it even matter that most GW/Chessex dice are fine when the ones you are personally using are badly imbalanced and messing up your personal gameplay? Automatically Appended Next Post: CrownAxe wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
How is it unreasonable to expect someone to replicate an experiment someone has already done? If one person can do it another person can repeat it. We aren't splitting the atom here.
Why exactly haven't you personally replicated it yet to prove it wrong then? Just include more dice than 72.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
But I'm dealing with you guys who are saying things like 29% of 72,000 rolls are 1s is equally as unlikely as 100% of 1,000,000 rolls being 6s, and even I know that's completely wrong just from the numbers you're comparing, while you guys seem to think it's perfectly okay to say and defend as a valid comparison!
I already explained what I meant by that. You obviously didn't understand. I am not going to explain it again. Go back anf read again my last post on the topic.
"I don't believe you, so you're lying."
That is your argument to ignore 72,000 dice rolls that show GW and Chessex dice are poorly-made.
This article has been discussed numerous times over the last ten years. I read every page of every discussion on this article I could find. In these numerous threads there were a lot of people who ran their own experiments. None of them replicated the results of this study. None of them even hinted that ones would be significantly more probable. And I ran my own tests, which also did go against the results of the study. So no, I do not believe the results of this study. Whether due some colossal feth up or dishonesty this study's results are highly erroneous.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote: Pouncey wrote: CrownAxe wrote:I'm not trying to prove the article is lying. In fact I think those 72 dice are in fact unbalanced.
I'm saying that single article is not enough evidence to claim that Chessex and GW dice are on the whole unbalanced. A basic understanding on manufacturing and producing goods is enough to prove that it's sample size is too small to be conclusive.
In science you can't prove any hypothesis with a single study, you have to have multiple people repeat that experiment to verify those findings. That has not be done with this article.
Okay. How many Chessex and GW dice do you think are unbalanced then? Because this article seems to suggest the answer is "at least 72" not "0."
I never said 0 and doesn't need to be 0. If 99% of all dice were balanced that would be excellent and statistically indistinguishable from 100% balanced dice. But 99% of 1 million dice still means you have 10000 dice that are unbalanced. That's why a person testing only 72 dice from a single pack is not statistically significant because that is a small number when compared to 10000 unbalanced dice and that number is insignificantly small when compared. to the 990000 balanced dice
You remember earlier in this thread when I talked about how my white GW dice seemed to roll way more 1s than they should so I invented the idea of ballast dice?
Is it possible that the 10 or so white dice in my collection of at least 200 or so GW/Chessex dice, that roll that many more 1s than normal are actually so poorly manufactured that I could probably say I have dice in my collection that are balanced even worse than the worst offenders in the study, in my personal collection? Even though the rest of my collection of dice seem to roll totally fine all the time?
Because the fact that 5% of my GW/Chessex dice are unbalanced severely is messing up my gameplay badly.
To which I must ask.
Does it even matter that most GW/Chessex dice are fine when the ones you are personally using are badly imbalanced and messing up your personal gameplay?
To the individual no. But if you are only looking at an individual's personal dice then it doesn't matter what any article or study says anyway. All that actually matters is if those specific dice are unbalanced and you can only prove that by testing them yourself
Automatically Appended Next Post:
CrownAxe wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
How is it unreasonable to expect someone to replicate an experiment someone has already done? If one person can do it another person can repeat it. We aren't splitting the atom here.
Why exactly haven't you personally replicated it yet to prove it wrong then? Just include more dice than 72.
I because I don't care about proving that cheesex dice are balanced. I'm just pointing out that the little evidence we do have isn't sufficient enough to prove that they aren't balanced.
50012
Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
You remember earlier in this thread when I talked about how my white GW dice seemed to roll way more 1s than they should so I invented the idea of ballast dice?
Take those dice and throw them thousand or at least couple of hundred times and write down the results. Then you have pretty good idea whether they actually roll more ones or whether you're just imagining it.
69938
Post by: General Annoyance
May as well toss this into the mix; I've noticed that my Munitorum Issue dice roll 1's and 2's far more often than I'd consider normal within the terms of random probability. However, I know these dice aren't exactly the greatest - some have indentations, others chips on the corners.
With every other dice pack I've used over the years, I've never really noticed any consistent pattern. Even if I believed that those dice were not random enough, I'd throw them into a dice pool with my opponent like most people have suggested here to solve the issue.
G.A
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
You remember earlier in this thread when I talked about how my white GW dice seemed to roll way more 1s than they should so I invented the idea of ballast dice?
Take those dice and throw them thousand or at least couple of hundred times and write down the results. Then you have pretty good idea whether they actually roll more ones or whether you're just imagining it.
Or, I could not do that, and instead stop using those dice and use a different color dice for melta rolls, which would solve the problem I am imagining to myself instead of just proving there is a problem and then doing so anyways.
I mean, you're saying I should prove something about a problem I can just solve by using different dice.
Whether it's true or not, if I believe those other dice are giving me random results, why should I prove it instead of just doing what I'd do after proving it - use different dice from the 95% of my collection no one believes is unbalanced? Automatically Appended Next Post: New question, since you're people of science:
Why is the response to:
"I believe that 5% of my personal dice are heavily unbalanced."
To ask me to prove it?
Instead of saying:
"So throw those dice in the garbage."
50012
Post by: Crimson
If you don't care about the truth, then you don't care. Not my problem if you throw your dice away.
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
Why would you throw away something you spent good money on just because they might possibly be unbalanced?
43778
Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote:Why would you throw away something you spent good money on just because they might possibly be unbalanced?
Because I have 190 other dice that seem to work just fine and the amount of money I spent on 10 GW dice is less than the cost of a single Battle Sister.
Also, I don't even have to throw them out. I could make really good use of them by always using them for Leadership rolls and nothing else.
The study says that me doing so would make me a cheater.
The study even said you should keep using GW dice after everything it said. Leadership tests and other times where rolling more 1s than normal is beneficial already exist in WH40k. And the guy who wrote the article thought that over an entire game, the fact you used GW dice or casino dice would make no difference to the outcome of the game.
Then he said that people who use GW dice for leadership tests, and casino dice for everything else, are people you should call out for cheating now that you had read a scientific analysis of Chessex, GW, board game and casino dice that proved they were cheating.
I mean, you DID read the part where he said that rolling as many extra 1s as they did was a problem that would solve itself in a normal game of 40k, right? Automatically Appended Next Post: Crimson wrote:If you don't care about the truth, then you don't care. Not my problem if you throw your dice away.
What does your doctor tell you when you tell them your arm hurts when you make a weird motion with it you won't ever make unless you want to be making it?
"Stop doing it."
Do they attempt to prove anything about why you were feeling that pain, or do they just tell you to stop doing the thing you will never be doing unless you want to be doing it?
Does it matter to you personally WHY you felt that pain you will never feel again in your life by not doing that thing anymore? Do you insist on tests to prove it?
Or do you just stop doing the thing you don't have to be doing, that is causing you pain, and leave it at that?
76717
Post by: CrownAxe
I'm only here to point out that that article isn't significant evidence of anything.
Or are you going to keep ignoring my last post on the matter?
43778
Post by: Pouncey
CrownAxe wrote:I'm only here to point out that that article isn't significant evidence of anything.
Or are you going to keep ignoring my last post on the matter?
You know, GW could've known it already and written the rules around the fact their dice roll more 1s than normal. The article says that may have happened.
WH40k is already making use of rules that require a non-even distribution of results, literally every time it has you roll 2d6.
"1d6 results in 29% 1s" isn't anything you couldn't design rules around more than the following:
https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=distribution+of+2d6
Why are you even so obsessed with proving or disproving something that will never be used to affect anything more important to the world than a tabletop game being played for fun?
It's not. That. Important.
Anything where it is important to use perfectly fair dice isn't using GW or Chessex dice, it's using casino dice.
81927
Post by: Farseer Anath'lan
If it's not that important Pouncey, stop harping on it, and accept that other people's results and opinions are different.
The fact that a 29% 1's is dependent on flawed manufacturing, and the % is liable to change over time, would make planning a game around it flawed practise.
And really, GW sat down and made a statistical analysis of their dice before writing rules?
2D6 is predictable and regular, and is a much better model then the one GW uses.
Otherwise, I ran my own test with my Chesex.
30 dice, tossed in two lots of 20, so 1200 rolls total.
First test, in a box on carpet (so shock absorbent) averaged 13% 1's, with a Stderr of 1.1%. 600 rolls.
Second, on a table, so a more 'realistic' test, averaged 17% 1's, with a Stderr of 0.9%.
Together, averaging 15% with Stderr 0.7%.
Much closer to average, much more inline with the majority of results reported. I'm going to add that I think the 'big study' is probably the outlier.
98665
Post by: SpinCycleDreadnought
And lo, the Dreadnought has been awoken from slumber and doesn't have coffee (pepsi is a poor, but caffeine rich substitute).
Ok, seeing more back and forth here than at Wimbledon I decided to do a test of my own to see if there's any inherent bias.
Using 4 different sets of dice: Blue GW dice cube (BGW), White GW dice from numerous starter sets (WGW), 'Lotus' coloured Chessex dice (LtsChx) and Green w/ bronze pip Chessex dice (GrnChx) I made 599 rolls total, due in part from rolling individually to start but getting tired and moving to whole sets. I did throw 4x9 twice to spice up the random. Shouldn't have done that but meh, I'm a medical scientist not a statistician (which is someone better qualified than a scientist to conduct this experiment).
population of each set is as follows:
n=25, BGW
n=42, WGW
n= 36, both LtsChx and GrnChx
Now I'll admit this isn't a properly performed experiment, fraught with inconsistent methods of rolling the dice (singly, batches of whole populations, 9 from each set rolled together) but the percentages are roughly equal. I am on holidays and really can't be stuffed to do this scientifically, so there.
The results won't be significant or anything but damn are all result percentages close to some kind of bell curve barring the green Chessex dice, which didn't want to roll a 3 all that often.
What was interesting to note was that there were some pretty statistically anomalous dice rolls. In one set of Lotus Chessex rolls (dice rolled = 36), 13 were 5's. Another example of statistically unlikeliness was the disproportionately low number of 3's rolled with green Chessex dice. Undoubtedly if n=10,000 or higher, the results would be closer to 16% across the board, with slight bias one way of the other. Point is that with the percent of 2's rolled being >30% doesn't indicate my dice are weighted to give 2's more often than not. Blue GW dice seem to have a nicer distribution, almost some kind of bell curve.
Take home message is that the dice gods hate you and will always hate you and that Mork (or possibly Gork) is the god to pray to. The End.
PS: Please report any unregistered Psyker activity to the Inquisition. Such activity may include, but is not limited to: Telepathy, telekinesis, biomancy, love of disco, and failure to praise the Emperor.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
I tried the 'if it floats it's a witch!' test just out of curiosity, but I'm not going to get a joke out of it (or have to burn any of my dice at the stake) since all the dice I tested (GW dice, PP starter set dice, FFG RPG dice, Godslayer dice, and a few MTG spindowns just in case) behaved exactly the same. So if you're having trouble rolling any of those buying a new set isn't going to help unless it's going to exorcise demons of some sort, the quality control is probably working.
Also spent a bit of time adding to SpinCycle's data set. Rolled a batch of fifteen blue GW dice (on the logic that large batches is close to 'normal game conditions') twenty times and came up with:
1: 38 (12.6%)
2: 51 (17%)
3: 46 (15.3%)
4: 49 (16.3%)
5: 57 (19%)
6: 59 (19.6%)
Adding that to SpinCycle's data set we're actually pretty close to what we'd expect out of fair dice (16.67% chance of any given result), except that we've gotten many fewer 1s than we'd expect (12.5% of rolls).
If you've got a spare ten minutes and some GW dice you could help add to the data set, see if any patterns emerge as we go.
(The explanation I usually hear is that GW dice have indented pips so the '1' face is actually the heaviest, so they're slightly more likely to roll high than low)
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Post by: Pouncey
 Farseer Anath'lan wrote:If it's not that important Pouncey, stop harping on it, and accept that other people's results and opinions are different.
The fact that a 29% 1's is dependent on flawed manufacturing, and the % is liable to change over time, would make planning a game around it flawed practise.
And really, GW sat down and made a statistical analysis of their dice before writing rules?
2D6 is predictable and regular, and is a much better model then the one GW uses.
Otherwise, I ran my own test with my Chesex.
30 dice, tossed in two lots of 20, so 1200 rolls total.
First test, in a box on carpet (so shock absorbent) averaged 13% 1's, with a Stderr of 1.1%. 600 rolls.
Second, on a table, so a more 'realistic' test, averaged 17% 1's, with a Stderr of 0.9%.
Together, averaging 15% with Stderr 0.7%.
Much closer to average, much more inline with the majority of results reported. I'm going to add that I think the 'big study' is probably the outlier.
I didn't even want to discuss this! My OP wasn't ABOUT this article at all! It's about what the guy at the store said!
Also, why the hell does it matter if you roll twice as many 1s?
Here's the difference between 6 dice rolls:
16.7% 1s:
1,2,3,4,5,6
33% 1s:
1,1,3,4,5,6
You probably would just chalk it up to random chance making you a bit unlucky!
50012
Post by: Crimson
No one cares what some guy in the store said, and it matters massively if ones are twice as likely as they should. Think about it, if you're playing a terminator heavy GK army, you're failing armour saves twice as often as you should. That is a huge difference.
47138
Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote:...Also, why the hell does it matter if you roll twice as many 1s?
Here's the difference between 6 dice rolls:
16.7% 1s:
1,2,3,4,5,6
33% 1s:
1,1,3,4,5,6
You probably would just chalk it up to random chance making you a bit unlucky!
You do know this is why people have been trying to make a point by posting the results of 300 or 1200 rolls, not the result of 6, right?
43778
Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:No one cares what some guy in the store said, and it matters massively if ones are twice as likely as they should. Think about it, if you're playing a terminator heavy GK army, you're failing armour saves twice as often as you should. That is a huge difference.
I cared, so I thought I'd share the story, like we share stories around here for fun.
Yeah, it is. But it already happens that you take 5 lasgun wounds on 5 Terminators and roll 5 1s.
Over a thousand dice rolls it's a big difference, yeah. But when the hell have you EVER rolled a thousand dice at once?
Usually the most dice I roll at once is about 20 when firing a squad of 10 Battle Sisters' bolters. Rolling twice as many 1s as normal just means that I roll six 1s instead of 3 on average. And that's with the absolute worst offender in the article. The least was only at 23%, which is a third extra 1s, which would mean I'd roll four 1s instead of three.
The scale on which it matters is bigger than what you'll see in a game. You're not rolling enough dice at once to notice.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
 AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote:...Also, why the hell does it matter if you roll twice as many 1s?
Here's the difference between 6 dice rolls:
16.7% 1s:
1,2,3,4,5,6
33% 1s:
1,1,3,4,5,6
You probably would just chalk it up to random chance making you a bit unlucky!
You do know this is why people have been trying to make a point by posting the results of 300 or 1200 rolls, not the result of 6, right?
When was the last time you rolled 300 dice at once in a game, much less 1200? Do you make a habit of fielding extremely large Green Tide formations or something? How did you even get that many models in range of your target?
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Post by: Crimson
What the hell does it matter if the dice are rolled at once? You roll many dice over the games and even more over several games.
If the imbalance as high as suggested in the article was real, the dice being used would probably be the biggest single factor deciding the outcome of the game.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:What the hell does it matter if the dice are rolled at once? You roll many dice over the games and even more over several games.
If the imbalance as high as suggested in the article was real, the dice being used would probably be the biggest single factor deciding the outcome of the game.
You know what dice rolls don't matter whatsoever to the outcome of a game? The dice rolls you made in your previous game.
Also, rolling 1s is often good, you know. Rolling more 1s than normal helps you pass Leadership tests. Leadership tests can be hugely important, and if the dice are imbalanced, you're also passing more of those. Characteristic tests can often be a matter of "roll low or die instantly."
So it balances out since rolling 1s isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes you WANT to roll 1s.
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Post by: Crimson
There are way more situations where rolling low is bad than good. For starters space marine armies don't much worry about LD tests. Sure, they may matter a tiny bit, but it's not a big deal.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote:...Also, why the hell does it matter if you roll twice as many 1s?
Here's the difference between 6 dice rolls:
16.7% 1s:
1,2,3,4,5,6
33% 1s:
1,1,3,4,5,6
You probably would just chalk it up to random chance making you a bit unlucky!
You do know this is why people have been trying to make a point by posting the results of 300 or 1200 rolls, not the result of 6, right?
When was the last time you rolled 300 dice at once in a game, much less 1200? Do you make a habit of fielding extremely large Green Tide formations or something? How did you even get that many models in range of your target?
You're the one insisting slight imperfections in the dice have something to do with the 'ultimate condemnation' of the game. No game cares about a half a percent variance, no matter how well-made it is, just because we'd all get bored and go home long before we rolled enough dice to notice.
(80 is probably the soft limit for the number of dice you're getting out of a single attack; you can get more, but if you are it's pobably because you're doing something silly just to set the record rather than because you actually need to. For reference the two units off the top of my head that will put out eighty shots are Legion Tactical Squads (in which case that's eighty bolter shots) or Secutarii Peltasts (in which case they're S3/ AP-/Shred).)
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:There are way more situations where rolling low is bad than good. For starters space marine armies don't much worry about LD tests. Sure, they may matter a tiny bit, but it's not a big deal.
Yeah, uh, a lot of people don't play Space Marines.
And your squad passing a morale test to avoid running off the table seems pretty important.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
AnomanderRake wrote:
You're the one insisting slight imperfections in the dice have something to do with the 'ultimate condemnation' of the game. No game cares about a half a percent variance, no matter how well-made it is, just because we'd all get bored and go home long before we rolled enough dice to notice.
(80 is probably the soft limit for the number of dice you're getting out of a single attack; you can get more, but if you are it's pobably because you're doing something silly just to set the record rather than because you actually need to. For reference the two units off the top of my head that will put out eighty shots are Legion Tactical Squads (in which case that's eighty bolter shots) or Secutarii Peltasts (in which case they're S3/ AP-/Shred).)
If you're gonna argue with me what I meant when I wrote the OP, you should probably read more of it than the first sentence. Also you should read the full title instead of all of it except the last word.
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Post by: Crimson
If I were given a choice between balanced dice and ones that roll ones almost twice as often as they should in order to play a game of 40K, I would choose the balanced dice every time. And if my opponent was then using the imbalanced dice, I would have a huge advantage. Thinking that this wouldn't be the case shows a shocking lack of understanding regarding both 40K rules and probability.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:If I were given a choice between balanced dice and ones that roll ones almost twice as often as they should in order to play a game of 40K, I would choose the balanced dice every time. And if my opponent was then using the imbalanced dice, I would have a huge advantage. Thinking that this wouldn't be the case shows a shocking lack of understanding regarding both 40K rules and probability.
The article disagrees with you. The article thinks it doesn't matter if you use casino dice or unbalanced GW dice, so long as you use the same dice for everything. The article even says that if you use GW dice and your opponent uses casino dice, it doesn't matter.
You're making a bigger deal out of this than the article did, you know.
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Post by: Crimson
The article is bollocks and you're silly for believing it. Thinking that such a massive increase in failure rate wouldn't matter is completely absurd.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote:The article is bollocks and you're silly for believing it. Thinking that such a massive increase in failure rate wouldn't matter is completely absurd.
Okay.
So then ignore it and play with your GW dice like the article suggested you should do even if you believed the article.
What exactly would you do differently if you believed the article and took its suggestion of playing with GW dice anyways?
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
What exactly would you do differently if you believed the article and took its suggestion of playing with GW dice anyways?
Well obviously I would never play with such dice. The dice that imbalanced would have a huge effect on how the game plays. The areas most obviously affected would be units with good armour saves and get's hot weapons which would be massively worse than they should. Weapons relying on scatter would be somewhat better than they should. And of course if only one side was using such dice, that side would be completely fethed unless they built their entire army around scatter-based weapons (and probably still, because they would have significant disadvantage while wounding and making armour pen rolls.)
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
What exactly would you do differently if you believed the article and took its suggestion of playing with GW dice anyways?
Well obviously I would never play with such dice. The dice that imbalanced would have a huge effect on how the game plays. The areas most obviously affected would be units with good armour saves and get's hot weapons which would be massively worse than they should. Weapons relying on scatter would be somewhat better than they should. And of course if only one side was using such dice, that side would be completely fethed unless they built their entire army around scatter-based weapons (and probably still, because they would have significant disadvantage while wounding and making armour pen rolls.)
And you would solve that like I said in the OP I did, by going to a store to order balanced dice.
Why would you keep playing with dice that you thought were screwing you over, instead of just buying new dice that you believe are fair? Dice aren't a rarity, you can just buy different ones.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
AnomanderRake wrote:
You're the one insisting slight imperfections in the dice have something to do with the 'ultimate condemnation' of the game. No game cares about a half a percent variance, no matter how well-made it is, just because we'd all get bored and go home long before we rolled enough dice to notice.
(80 is probably the soft limit for the number of dice you're getting out of a single attack; you can get more, but if you are it's pobably because you're doing something silly just to set the record rather than because you actually need to. For reference the two units off the top of my head that will put out eighty shots are Legion Tactical Squads (in which case that's eighty bolter shots) or Secutarii Peltasts (in which case they're S3/ AP-/Shred).)
If you're gonna argue with me what I meant when I wrote the OP, you should probably read more of it than the first sentence. Also you should read the full title instead of all of it except the last word.
Fine. To summarize.
Your initial point was that you'd came across a person in a game store, who'd read an article you'd read condemning GW/Chessex dice as unfair. When purchasing some dice from him he told you that (and I quote) "'If you're playing Warhammer 40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about game balance to need fair dice.'". You then bought 'unfair' dice and have never regretted the decision since.
I'm taking issue with the suggestion that the variance in die rolls matters in any way. The fundamental assumption behind this whole discussion is that slight variances in your dice are going to make one whit of difference in any wargame, but the miniscule fractions we're talking about aren't going to manifest themselves in the data if you keep track of all your die rolls for a year, let along make any difference to the outcome of a single game.
The assertion that 40k players don't care enough about game balance to need 'fair dice' is stupid. 'Fair dice'/'unfair dice' are important for casinos, but for the rest of us they're a demon to blame bad rolls on or a marketing phrase to sell more expensive dice to mildly OCD people. You don't need to care about whether your dice are fair in 40k because as far as the scale of die rolls in a game goes they already are fair, you don't need to care about whether you've got optimal perfect dice any more or less than you do in any other game.
Thus the suggestion that this has anything to do with a condemnation of 40k in particular is nonsense. You could find-replace every instance of ' 40k' in your conversation with the game store employee from the original post with 'Warmachine' and end up with the exact same conversation and the exact same level of gibberish.
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Post by: Pouncey
AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
AnomanderRake wrote:
You're the one insisting slight imperfections in the dice have something to do with the 'ultimate condemnation' of the game. No game cares about a half a percent variance, no matter how well-made it is, just because we'd all get bored and go home long before we rolled enough dice to notice.
(80 is probably the soft limit for the number of dice you're getting out of a single attack; you can get more, but if you are it's pobably because you're doing something silly just to set the record rather than because you actually need to. For reference the two units off the top of my head that will put out eighty shots are Legion Tactical Squads (in which case that's eighty bolter shots) or Secutarii Peltasts (in which case they're S3/ AP-/Shred).)
If you're gonna argue with me what I meant when I wrote the OP, you should probably read more of it than the first sentence. Also you should read the full title instead of all of it except the last word.
Fine. To summarize.
Your initial point was that you'd came across a person in a game store, who'd read an article you'd read condemning GW/Chessex dice as unfair. When purchasing some dice from him he told you that (and I quote) "'If you're playing Warhammer 40k, you're not the kind of person who cares enough about game balance to need fair dice.'". You then bought 'unfair' dice and have never regretted the decision since.
I'm taking issue with the suggestion that the variance in die rolls matters in any way. The fundamental assumption behind this whole discussion is that slight variances in your dice are going to make one whit of difference in any wargame, but the miniscule fractions we're talking about aren't going to manifest themselves in the data if you keep track of all your die rolls for a year, let along make any difference to the outcome of a single game.
The assertion that 40k players don't care enough about game balance to need 'fair dice' is stupid. 'Fair dice'/'unfair dice' are important for casinos, but for the rest of us they're a demon to blame bad rolls on or a marketing phrase to sell more expensive dice to mildly OCD people. You don't need to care about whether your dice are fair in 40k because as far as the scale of die rolls in a game goes they already are fair, you don't need to care about whether you've got optimal perfect dice any more or less than you do in any other game.
Thus the suggestion that this has anything to do with a condemnation of 40k in particular is nonsense. You could find-replace every instance of ' 40k' in your conversation with the game store employee from the original post with 'Warmachine' and end up with the exact same conversation and the exact same level of gibberish.
You might want to re-read. I read that article online. THEN I went to the store to buy better dice. THEN I found out he had ALSO read that article. He asked if the dice I was buying were for WH40k.
That's the point he was trying to get across to me. That I didn't need to buy the dice from him, because the game isn't balanced well enough to NEED fair dice. That I had erred in thinking that I NEED fair dice to enjoy WH40k, because the game is NOT balanced well enough for it to MATTER.
Maybe it's not just 40k. Maybe he WOULD have said the same thing if the dice I were buying were for Warmachine. The topic of other tabletop games NEVER came up.
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Post by: Crimson
Pouncey wrote:
And you would solve that like I said in the OP I did, by going to a store to order balanced dice.
I have (sufficiently) balanced dice.
Why would you keep playing with dice that you thought were screwing you over, instead of just buying new dice that you believe are fair? Dice aren't a rarity, you can just buy different ones.
I don't believe my dice are screwing me over, in fact, I know with reasonable confidence that they aren't. If you (or anyone else) believed the article and as a result bough expensive 'perfect' dice, then you were conned. The problem is not real and the fix for it is not real. Now, in this case it is pretty innocious, it is a game and even the expensive dice are not that expensive, so it really is not that big of a deal. But then again, the world is full of similar gak relating to more serious issues and involving bigger amounts of money. People are conned in believing there is problem that can be fixed by buying some expensive doodah or magic potion or whatnot. It is most serious when it comes to health, people have died because they believed in all sorts of magic crystal or homeopathy bogus cures and refused to seek a real doctor.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Pouncey wrote:
And you would solve that like I said in the OP I did, by going to a store to order balanced dice.
I have (sufficiently) balanced dice.
Exactly. You believe the article is entirely wrong, so you keep using your GW dice since you don't believe they're causing you any problems. I believe the article is correct, so I keep using my GW dice since I don't believe they're causing me any problems.
Why does it even matter enough to prove the article wrong if you're gonna do the same thing whether you believe it or not?
Why would you keep playing with dice that you thought were screwing you over, instead of just buying new dice that you believe are fair? Dice aren't a rarity, you can just buy different ones.
I don't believe my dice are screwing me over, in fact, I know with reasonable confidence that they aren't. If you (or anyone else) believed the article and as a result bough expensive 'perfect' dice, then you were conned. The problem is not real and the fix for it is not real. Now, in this case it is pretty innocious, it is a game and even the expensive dice are not that expensive, so it really is not that big of a deal. But then again, the world is full of similar gak relating to more serious issues and involving bigger amounts of money. People are conned in believing there is problem that can be fixed by buying some expensive doodah or magic potion or whatnot. It is most serious when it comes to health, people have died because they believed in all sorts of magic crystal or homeopathy bogus cures and refused to seek a real doctor.
You JUST said the expensive dice are NOT THAT EXPENSIVE.
And the article even SAID you can keep playing with your GW dice and it's totally fine.
THE ARTICLE SAID YOU' LL BE FINE IF YOU JUST KEEP THE DICE YOU'RE ALREADY USING.
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Post by: Crimson
You're fine using the GW dice, because the article's claims about the imbalance are complete bogus. If they were true you would not be fine (not being fine in this context defined as losing significantly more games than you otherwise would.)
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote:...because the game is NOT balanced well enough for it to MATTER...
I'm trying to point out that this specific thought is complete nonsense. There is NO GAME in which having 'fair dice' matters, and hence the idea that this is somehow a condemnation of 40k is ridiculous.
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Post by: Crimson
AnomanderRake wrote:
I'm trying to point out that this specific thought is complete nonsense. There is NO GAME in which having 'fair dice' matters, and hence the idea that this is somehow a condemnation of 40k is ridiculous.
You're wrong. Sure, the imperfections that actually exist in dice do not matter, because they're so small. However, the article which OP thinks is true claims that GW/Chessex dice roll ones ALMOST TWICE as often as they statistically should. Now, such imbalance of course does not actually exist, and it is unlikely it could exist unless the dice were intentionally weighted so. However, if it would exist, it definitely would matter.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Crimson wrote: AnomanderRake wrote:
I'm trying to point out that this specific thought is complete nonsense. There is NO GAME in which having 'fair dice' matters, and hence the idea that this is somehow a condemnation of 40k is ridiculous.
You're wrong. Sure, the imperfections that actually exist in dice do not matter, because they're so small. However, the article which OP thinks is true claims that GW/Chessex dice roll ones ALMOST TWICE as often as they statistically should. Now, such imbalance of course does not actually exist, and it is unlikely it could exist unless the dice were intentionally weighted so. However, if it would exist, it definitely would matter.
...Fine. Connect me back to any kind of condemnation of 40k out of this. How much arguing over whether hypothetical rigged dice are rigged or not do we really need?
The OP is claiming to have rigged dice that roll 1s twice as often as they should, and claiming that 40k keeps going in spite of it. Cool. I disagree with the facts. I put it to you that these hypothetical dice that roll 1s 1/3rd of the time don't exist and that Pouncey has been playing 40k with plain, ordinary, normal, dice that roll within a percent or two of what they should be rolling all this time.
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Post by: Crimson
AnomanderRake wrote:I put it to you that these hypothetical dice that roll 1s 1/3rd of the time don't exist and that Pouncey has been playing 40k with plain, ordinary, normal, dice that roll within a percent or two of what they should be rolling all this time.
Yep. I'm about 99% certain that this exactly is the case.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Crimson wrote: AnomanderRake wrote:I put it to you that these hypothetical dice that roll 1s 1/3rd of the time don't exist and that Pouncey has been playing 40k with plain, ordinary, normal, dice that roll within a percent or two of what they should be rolling all this time.
Yep. I'm about 99% certain that this exactly is the case.
So the eight pages that were there before I came in on this were entirely Pouncey whining about bad dice.
Can we call the mods to lock this thread yet?
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Post by: Pouncey
AnomanderRake wrote: Crimson wrote: AnomanderRake wrote:I put it to you that these hypothetical dice that roll 1s 1/3rd of the time don't exist and that Pouncey has been playing 40k with plain, ordinary, normal, dice that roll within a percent or two of what they should be rolling all this time.
Yep. I'm about 99% certain that this exactly is the case.
So the eight pages that were there before I came in on this were entirely Pouncey whining about bad dice.
Can we call the mods to lock this thread yet?
No, they were mostly people who came into what I thought would be a fun discussion on a story, and decided to start arguing seriously about math.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
"The ultimate condemnation of WH40k's rules" is a pretty inflammatory starting point for a 'fun discission on a story', especially when the story has nothing to do with it.
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Post by: Pouncey
AnomanderRake wrote:"The ultimate condemnation of WH40k's rules" is a pretty inflammatory starting point for a 'fun discission on a story', especially when the story has nothing to do with it.
So basically I wrote a bad title and you decided to start arguing about math?
Instead of just saying, "Hey, your title's a bit extreme, maybe rephrase it a bit?"
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote: AnomanderRake wrote:"The ultimate condemnation of WH40k's rules" is a pretty inflammatory starting point for a 'fun discission on a story', especially when the story has nothing to do with it.
So basically I wrote a bad title and you decided to start arguing about math?
Instead of just saying, "Hey, your title's a bit extreme, maybe rephrase it a bit?"
You wrote a post including a title, which made a point I thought was wrong, which was also (independently) a point unconnected to the title. Math happened to be relevant to establishing that.
Can I just ask what you expected to get out of insulting 40k players in the 40k general discussion thread? Did you expect to have a nice calm chat about it?
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Post by: Pouncey
AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote: AnomanderRake wrote:"The ultimate condemnation of WH40k's rules" is a pretty inflammatory starting point for a 'fun discission on a story', especially when the story has nothing to do with it.
So basically I wrote a bad title and you decided to start arguing about math?
Instead of just saying, "Hey, your title's a bit extreme, maybe rephrase it a bit?"
You wrote a post including a title, which made a point I thought was wrong, which was also (independently) a point unconnected to the title. Math happened to be relevant to establishing that.
Can I just ask what you expected to get out of insulting 40k players in the 40k general discussion thread? Did you expect to have a nice calm chat about it?
You know that I'm a 40k player too, right? What I said in the OP was said directly to me, so it applies to me too. And I didn't get upset about it, since I knew it was true. And it's not an insult to care more about whether a game is fun than whether it's balanced.
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote:...You know that I'm a 40k player too, right? What I said in the OP was said directly to me, so it applies to me too. And I didn't get upset about it, since I knew it was true. And it's not an insult to care more about whether a game is fun than whether it's balanced.
That's the fundamental issue. You "knew it was true" that 40k players "don't care enough about balance to use 'fair dice'". It's a stupid statement on so many levels that I'm not going to go through them yet again I'm simply going to say that it's not even wrong (explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong before someone misinterprets that sentence and starts us down yet another walk into the weeds).
You're lending infinitely more credence to that statement than it deserves by repeating it, let alone by endorsing it. Some of us who play 40k, do care about balance, and know what we're talking about with respect to dice would consider that insulting.
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Post by: Pouncey
AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote:...You know that I'm a 40k player too, right? What I said in the OP was said directly to me, so it applies to me too. And I didn't get upset about it, since I knew it was true. And it's not an insult to care more about whether a game is fun than whether it's balanced.
That's the fundamental issue. You "knew it was true" that 40k players "don't care enough about balance to use 'fair dice'". It's a stupid statement on so many levels that I'm not going to go through them yet again I'm simply going to say that it's not even wrong (explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong before someone misinterprets that sentence and starts us down yet another walk into the weeds).
You're lending infinitely more credence to that statement than it deserves by repeating it, let alone by endorsing it. Some of us who play 40k, do care about balance, and know what we're talking about with respect to dice would consider that insulting.
Well, clearly this was an incredibly dumb thread for me to make and there's no reason for it to continue.
If I contact a moderator by PM, and I ask them to lock this thread since it should never have been made, will they do it since I'm the one who wrote it?
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Post by: AnomanderRake
Pouncey wrote: AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote:...You know that I'm a 40k player too, right? What I said in the OP was said directly to me, so it applies to me too. And I didn't get upset about it, since I knew it was true. And it's not an insult to care more about whether a game is fun than whether it's balanced.
That's the fundamental issue. You "knew it was true" that 40k players "don't care enough about balance to use 'fair dice'". It's a stupid statement on so many levels that I'm not going to go through them yet again I'm simply going to say that it's not even wrong (explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong before someone misinterprets that sentence and starts us down yet another walk into the weeds).
You're lending infinitely more credence to that statement than it deserves by repeating it, let alone by endorsing it. Some of us who play 40k, do care about balance, and know what we're talking about with respect to dice would consider that insulting.
Well, clearly this was an incredibly dumb thread for me to make and there's no reason for it to continue.
If I contact a moderator by PM, and I ask them to lock this thread since it should never have been made, will they do it since I'm the one who wrote it?
I reported one of my own posts a little ways up the page, we should be hearing from them soon (I hope).
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Post by: Pouncey
AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote: AnomanderRake wrote: Pouncey wrote:...You know that I'm a 40k player too, right? What I said in the OP was said directly to me, so it applies to me too. And I didn't get upset about it, since I knew it was true. And it's not an insult to care more about whether a game is fun than whether it's balanced.
That's the fundamental issue. You "knew it was true" that 40k players "don't care enough about balance to use 'fair dice'". It's a stupid statement on so many levels that I'm not going to go through them yet again I'm simply going to say that it's not even wrong (explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong before someone misinterprets that sentence and starts us down yet another walk into the weeds).
You're lending infinitely more credence to that statement than it deserves by repeating it, let alone by endorsing it. Some of us who play 40k, do care about balance, and know what we're talking about with respect to dice would consider that insulting.
Well, clearly this was an incredibly dumb thread for me to make and there's no reason for it to continue.
If I contact a moderator by PM, and I ask them to lock this thread since it should never have been made, will they do it since I'm the one who wrote it?
I reported one of my own posts a little ways up the page, we should be hearing from them soon (I hope).
Works for me.
If a moderator reads this, just lock the thread. It's fine.
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Post by: Lamoura
I was actually watching a game earlier where i guy kept rolling 1's and 2's on all his melta attacks. he must be using the same brand.
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Post by: Crimson
 Lamoura wrote:I was actually watching a game earlier where i guy kept rolling 1's and 2's on all his melta attacks. he must be using the same brand.
Yeah, this is exactly how these rumours about crooked dice start. People remember an isolated streak of bad luck that is in reality a perfectly normal random occurrence.
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Post by: Pouncey
Crimson wrote: Lamoura wrote:I was actually watching a game earlier where i guy kept rolling 1's and 2's on all his melta attacks. he must be using the same brand.
Yeah, this is exactly how these rumours about crooked dice start. People remember an isolated streak of bad luck that is in reality a perfectly normal random occurrence.
Yup, then someone says that, and I say, "You'll see." and proceed to roll 4 1s and a 2 on 5 rolls.
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Post by: Grimskul
Pouncey wrote: Crimson wrote: Lamoura wrote:I was actually watching a game earlier where i guy kept rolling 1's and 2's on all his melta attacks. he must be using the same brand.
Yeah, this is exactly how these rumours about crooked dice start. People remember an isolated streak of bad luck that is in reality a perfectly normal random occurrence.
Yup, then someone says that, and I say, "You'll see." and proceed to roll 4 1s and a 2 on 5 rolls.
That works the opposite for me, I always seem to get lots of 6's when it comes to deny the witch rolls, does that mean I'm (anti?) psychic too?
Don't ask me the source of my powers though, you can't know and don't know 
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Post by: Pouncey
 Grimskul wrote: Pouncey wrote: Crimson wrote: Lamoura wrote:I was actually watching a game earlier where i guy kept rolling 1's and 2's on all his melta attacks. he must be using the same brand.
Yeah, this is exactly how these rumours about crooked dice start. People remember an isolated streak of bad luck that is in reality a perfectly normal random occurrence.
Yup, then someone says that, and I say, "You'll see." and proceed to roll 4 1s and a 2 on 5 rolls.
That works the opposite for me, I always seem to get lots of 6's when it comes to deny the witch rolls, does that mean I'm (anti?) psychic too?
Don't ask me the source of my powers though, you can't know and don't know
Why are you bringing your imaginary psychic powers up right now? It's not relevant to anything you replied to.
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