It’s not a new video, published close to the start of the year, but it’s new for me. And it’s mind-boggling.
Just how mind-boggling? The YouTube channel Science Shack says that these dice might give them cancer. And I think they might be right.
Inside the electronic dice machine is a chunk of uranium ore, and the half-life of that is used as the machine’s random generator. This is a true random generator (TRPG), better than some of the workarounds use by some computers.
The intro by the two presenters makes it clear;
This is a complete set of Dungeons & Dragons dice. Besides being all electronic, the big difference here is that this set is using radioactive decay to make it completely random. We decided on using a standard Dungeons & Dragons dice set because it covers all of the most commonly used dice configurations: The four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided, twelve-sided, twenty-sided, and 100-sided dice. But, seriously, the main reason for doing this how cool is it to have a nuclear dice set?”
I’m just impressed that they could buy autunite online!
The device checks once a second. An Arduino Mega 2560-compatible microcontroller hooked up to a Geiger counter runs on a normal battery.
Amusingly, Science Shack describes the process of rolling the dice, and there’s a button.
Then we press the big red button and radiation is detected and electronically converted into a random number. While the dice are being rolled you can see and hear the radiation triggering the Geiger counter and the uranium fluorescing. When the dice throws completed each dice value is displayed as well as the total amount.”
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