In this bonus episode, guest Louis Zocchi discusses his background in the gaming industry, specifically, how he became a manufacturer of dice designed to produce statistically uniform outcomes. During the show Louis mentioned a two part video listeners might enjoy: part 1 and part 2 can both be found on youtube. Kyle mentioned a robot capable of unnoticably cheating at Rock Paper Scissors / Ro Sham Bo. More details can be found here. Louis mentioned dice collector Kevin Cook whose website is DiceCollector.com While we're on the subject of table top role playing games, Kyle recommends these two related podcasts listeners might enjoy: The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast (on which host Kyle was recently a guest) had a great episode "Dungeons and Dragons - The Devil's Game?" which explores claims of D&Ds alleged ties to skepticism. Also, Kyle swears there's a great Monster Talk episode discussing claims of a satanic connection to Dungeons and Dragons, but despite mild efforts to locate it, he came up empty. Regardless, listeners of the Data Skeptic Podcast are encouraged to explore the back catalog to try and find the aforementioned episode of this great podcast. Last but not least, as mentioned in the outro, awesomedice.com did some great independent empirical testing that confirms Game Science dice are much closer to the desired uniform distribution over possible outcomes when compared to one leading manufacturer.
Data Skeptic
Game Science Dice with Louis Zocchi
(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the Data Skeptic Podcast. Dedicated fans of the show might be surprised to find this episode appearing in the feed on a Wednesday, given that Friday is the regular release date. I'll still be keeping my weekly Friday schedule, but from time to time, I may throw in a bonus episode here and there, especially when I have something like today's interview that perhaps strays a little bit off the beaten path of data science and skepticism and touches on quirky or ancillary topics that are still related to the show and things I think by listeners will definitely enjoy. I wanted to give a quick introduction to the show before we jump right into the interview. When I was a young teenager, I was very into tabletop role-playing games, board games, CCGs and things like that. The annual gaming convention GenCon was at the time held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and along with a couple of friends, this became an annual pilgrimage. On one occasion, while exploring the exhibitors hall, I came across a booth selling peculiar looking dice. Unlike what I was used to, these dice had very precise and machined looking edges. Now, remembering that I was not no teenager at the time, I think I said something rude out loud, like these dice won't roll well given that they have these flat edges. And tactless, though, that may have been. In a way, I'm glad I said that because the proprietor, Louis Zaki, jumped right in and explained to me the superior devices of random chance that are his game science dice. I appreciated not only the precision and attention to detail that went into the manufacturing process, but also the character and personality of Louis' presentation. I picked up a set and enjoyed them for years thereafter. I went looking for my game science dice recently and found that they didn't seem to have made it with me on a cross-country move I did a few years ago. Luckily, I was able to track down a new set for myself, which inspired me to also track down the founder of game science, who generously spent some of his time telling me all about his instruments of random chance. I'll do an outro as well and add a few more details about some of Louis' upcoming appearances, but without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. And to my understanding, you're actually Colonel Louis Zaki. Would you prefer that title? - Well, I want to explain about it. - Sure. I was retired from the Air Force in '75 as a E-6. And when the United States went to war against Iraq, I was so concerned about what was happening. I couldn't sleep. I stayed up hour after hour watching to see what was gonna happen. And so in the end, a friend of mine came to me and said that, you know, you could join the state guard. And if you join the state guard, I can get you in as a first lieutenant. Well, I'd always wanted to be an officer, so I joined. And after six years, I had worked my way up to captain, but I was four years overdue for promotion to major. But the reason I didn't get promoted to major and nobody else did was because there was a dispute between the adjutant general and the commander of the state defense force. And neither was gonna give in to the other, since the adjutant general controlled our promotions. He stopped them. In the meantime, Kiesler Air Force Base was providing a free medical examination to all retirees who would show up. And so myself and another guy went to the Kiesler hospital and set up a table to talk to other retirees to see if they would be interested in joining the state guard. Three people who lived in Alabama showed up. I had their applications, but we couldn't get them into our unit because they lived out of state. So I called the Alabama State Defense Force and found out who was running the mobile unit and I mailed them the applications. And then it turned out that the guy who got it had the duty of being the instructor for that unit and I was the instructor for my unit. So I thought we could probably talk about teaching and help each other. His job was to drive gamblers from Mobile to Biloxi twice a week. And then he had four hours to wait while they were gambling and then he would drive him back. So he said to me, you know, I'm gonna be in on Tuesday. Why don't you come over and we'll talk while I'm waiting? So I did. And he invited me to attend one of their drills. So I went to one of their drills and I told my commander I was gonna go. And while I was there, I told him about the freeze on promotions and that I had written regulation governing the issuing of ribbon 'cause Mobile didn't have such a regulation. And so they said, well, do you have what you've done and what you can do and the fact that you've got all that time in grade, if you join us, we will promote you to major. So I took the immediate promotion to major and joined their organization and worked my way up to Fullbird Colonel. But there was a girl who didn't know anything about me who decided to write my biography for, I can't think of the name of it. It's the place you go when you wanna know anything about anything on the computer. - I would guess Wikipedia. - Yeah, that was it, Wikipedia. So when she's writing the Wikipedia article, she said the Zaki promoted himself to a Fullbird Colonel, which is not true. I work for that promotion and I got it from the state of Alabama. - Well, it's very cool. Myself and I'm sure all my listeners appreciate that service as well. - Well, having that great career, somewhere along the sides, you also became a dice manufacturer, if I'm not mistaken. - Yes. - How did you wind up getting into that? - I was the very first distributor to carry Dungeons and Dragons. And I picked it up not because I knew what it was, but because I knew who Gary Gygax was and I considered Gary to be a friend. And to my delight, it always outsold my anticipations. And so I was always having to order up more and more and more and more. But in those days, it came in a wood grain box with no dice. And if you didn't have dice, you couldn't sell the game. 'Cause every store that ordered the game also ordered a set of dice for every game they had. Dale Seymour was the name of the guy who ran a company called Creative Publications in Palo Alto, California. And every time I ordered 500 copies of Dungeons and Dragons from Gary, I should immediately get on the phone and order 500 sets of dice from Dale Seymour because if I waited two hours, I would discover that TSR had called and ordered up 500 sets of dice and I would have to wait a month to get more. So it was a constant race for dice. And I kept writing Dale Seymour asking, wasn't there a better way I could get more assured supply? For example, when you get dice from him, every packet has the five dice shapes in it. Why not sell me a barrel of fours, a barrel of sixes, a barrel of eights, et cetera, and so forth and I'll put them together myself, can I get a better price? So he wrote me back saying I'm really fed up with you're trying to get cheaper prices for the dice. If you want cheaper dice, make them yourself. Well, I went to high school with a friend and I played in the same band as him and he specialized in being a tool and die maker during high school. And so I told him about my problem when I was home visiting and showed him the dice and he said, well, I could make those. And I said, well, we're paying $1.50 to get a complete set of five dice. And he said, well, I can't beat that price because their employees work for $50 a week, whereas I get $20 an hour. But he said, I know a formula that's superior to the one they're using and it's made from a high impact plastic. And these dice will soldier on year after year. So if you make your own dice, we can't beat them on price but we sure can beat them on quality. So I gave him the money to build a tool and we made a 20-sided dice and the high impact plastic and sold them for a dollar each. And I was afraid nobody would buy them. But on the other hand, the dice from TSR would wear out and self-destruct within six months. And to my delight, the kids all wanted dice that would soldier on year after year. So they all paid the extra money. And then with the extra money, I built another tool, another tool, another tool and so forth. So for the first six years, I was making opaque polyhedra dice sets and I would send them out to the people who were distributing them. And I hadn't thought it through. And one of the people who was distributing them was the armory. And so he was putting his name on my dice and so were the other people. So they all had excellent reputations for manufacturing dice. And when they, armory called and told me I should give him all the dice that came out of the tool and screw all my other accounts. And I told him I wasn't gonna do that. So that's when he went into the dice business and so did the five others. So that was a major aggravation for me. And in those days, opaque colors like red, white, blue, yellow, green were all you could get. And nobody ever complained about the clip marks. So then I invented diamond dice and the armory called me up and told me I had no right to invent new colors without telling him first because he was telling everybody he was me. So after I came out with the Jim colored dice, that's when he built his tool and started making Jim colored dice and so did all the other people. - So a lot of my listeners come from the data science community and the skeptic community, people like statisticians and stuff like that. And there's a surprisingly strong overlap between people with those interests and people that like role playing games and board games and things like this. Yet just in case some of the people aren't too familiar with dice, a lot of people hear dice and they think about those white six-sided dice that just come with monopoly. I know you'd mentioned a couple of the variants before but would you mind giving me a quick definition of the variety of dice the game players need to get? - Well, in addition to the four and the six, the eight, the 10, the 12 and the 20 and the decade, I make a three, a five, a seven, a 14, a 16, a 24, a 50 and a 100. And in 2009, I won a gamma award for co-designing a dice we call the D total because it rolls like a two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 10, 12, 20, 24, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 100-sided dice. - And just in case anyone doesn't know, gamma, I believe, is the Game Manufacturers Association. Is that right? - That's right. - And it's pretty much the leading industry trade group to my understanding for anything in the gaming world. - Yeah, I was the first gamma vice president for its first five years and Rick Loomis was the first gamma president for the first five years. - So one of the reasons I especially wanted to have you on was, you know, I met you as a young man. It's been quite some time. It was at GenCon when it was still in Milwaukee and learned about the steps with which you took to make sure your dice were gonna have the precision that one would expect because any user of a dice should have a reasonable expectation that you're going to get an even uniform distribution over every face coming up. So in other words, if you're rolling a six-sided dice, you should get one sixth of the time. And if you're rolling a 10-sided dice, you should get that sixth one-tenth of the time. - Yes. - And to my understanding, that's not always true due to a lot of manufacturing flaws that are in some of the dice on the market. - Everybody else in the market takes a shortcut to put the ink in the digits so that you will have a contrasting color. When the dice are made, they're on a casting runner. Just like when you buy a plastic model airplane, you know, the wing and the fuselage and so forth has to be separated from that round sprue. And separating them always leaves a blemish. Doesn't matter how carefully you do the cut, you still have a blemish there. The first thing they have to do is they take all the dice that have been separated from the casting runner and they put them in a rock polisher and they tumble them until they polished off the blemish. Now that the blemish is gone, they take those dice and they put them in a french fry basket and sink the french fry basket into the bottom of a paint bucket. After they pull them back out, the dice are now totally covered with paint and after the dice have dried, they're put back into a rock polisher with a very coarse medium to polish off all the unwanted paint from the exterior surfaces of the die. But at the same time, it cannot get down in the grooves. So now you have contrasting color that makes the dice digits easier to read. But the dice also look terrible because they have all these scratch and gouge marks on them from tumbling in that rock polisher with the coarse medium. So they put them back into the rock polisher, but this time they use a fine medium and that fine medium polishes off all of the scratch marks and gouges and makes the die look more presentable. Now during all of these polishing steps, the dice edges are destroyed and the vertices are destroyed and every dice that comes out of that process has a unique radius where its edge used to be. And every dice face has a unique size instead of the precise size that it had at the beginning of this entire process. Consequently, dice that have come out of a rock polisher have a tendency to roll the numbers on their shortest sides far more often than they can roll the numbers on their tallest sides. And I took a photograph to prove that and I stacked PSR dice in the first stack and then I made a second stack and I got all the dice out of red box, dungeons and dragons. And when you look at the stack, you can see that the first stack is three quarters of an inch taller than the second stack. And the reason it is is because all the dice in the first stack were stacked with the number one facing the number 20 while all the dice in the second stack were stacked with the number nine facing the number 12, which means the dice is gonna roll a lot more nines and twells than it does ones and twenties 'cause it has a tendency to stop on its lowest center of gravity. And to illustrate that point, remember, when you take an egg out of a carton, it doesn't stand up on the table like it did when it was in the carton. It always rolls over on its side 'cause it's finding its lowest center of gravity. - That photograph you mentioned is a really powerful visualization that is stuck with me for some time. I remember seeing it, you know, many, many years ago and in very clear, unambiguous sense shows how there's a difference between those dice and a likely bias you're gonna get based on analysis. - Yeah, well, in 2008, I made a video that explained what I've just told you. If you have your people, go to youtube.com and then enter the name game and space and then the name science and then party. P-A-R-T-E-1-D-E-2. They will see part one of my 20 minute video that explains a lot more than I've done in this short period of time. And then there's a part two. And at the end of it, I take a two inch, six-sided dice and turn it into hundreds of polyhedras in less than a second. - Oh, neat. Yeah, I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes so listeners can go and check that out. - Did you do any empirical testing to validate that the game science dice you're manufacturing meet that fairness property that other dice weren't hitting? - Well, I'm glad you asked that question. First of all, there is a professor who teaches mathematics at a college in Canada. And he had always heard people saying that dime store dice are not as accurate as casino dice. And he got to wondering, was it really true? So he built a dice testing machine which was connected to a digital camera, which was connected to a computer that had a program in it that would tell how to count the result of the dice roll, regardless of what attitude the new face showed the camera. At the beginning of the day, he would put a dice in the machine and turn it on and then go teach his courses. And at the end of the day, he would come back and turn the machine off. And it would say, okay, I've done 5,675 rolls of which I got this many ones, this many twos, this many threes and so forth. So he put the dime store dice in the machine and then he put in the casino dice. And he told me he was shocked to discover that the dime store dice was coming up six times, more often on one face than it was on all the others. - Wow. - Now he never told me what face it was, but logic would indicate that because the six is opposite the one, the six has six dimples and the one side has only one dimple. And because the one side has only one dimple, I would assume that that face is heavier than the face that shows the six. And so I told him, I believe you're getting sixes because of what I've just explained. And he never confirmed or denied, we went on to talk about other things. But what shocked me was, I wasn't expecting the differential to be as high as what he discovered with his testing machine. So when I designed the five-sided dice, I did not know how thick to make it. So I made 10 of them or 11 of them. And each one was one millimeter thicker than the next. I mailed all of them to him and asked him to test them and tell me which of them would roll so that the two triangular faces would come up one fifth of the time and the three faces on the edges would come up three fifths of the time, two fifths and three fifths. Okay. And so after several months, he called me back and he said, "Okay, to get the promote for armaments "that you want out of these five-sided shapes, "you need to make it 13.85 millimeters thick." And I was stunned. I said, "First of all, a millimeter isn't very much. "And you want me to take one-fifteenth "of one millimeter off the dice. "How can you give me such a strange number?" 'Cause I didn't get, you know, I gave you a 12, a 13, a 14, and a 15, et cetera. How can you give me such a weird number? He said, "Well, after I rolled "the 10 millimeter thick dice, "I plotted its performance." And I rolled the 11 and plotted its performance. I rolled the 12 and plotted its performance and I rolled the 13 and then the 14 and I could see. According to the plots, the 13.85 is the thickest you need to get the performance you want. So I started bragging about the fact that we had all this research that would give the dice the performance I wanted. And I was trying to demonstrate this to a lady who had a store and I was rolling on her glass showcase. And every time I rolled the dice, it came up as a one or a five on a triangle face. And it never did come up on its edges. And that's when it occurred to me, glass has no give back and metal has no give back. And he did his testing on six millimeter thick plastic and then he changed it to 12 millimeter thick plastic to see if the results he found on the first study would hold up and they did. So what I have begun telling people who buy the dice from me is what I've just told you, don't roll it on metal, don't roll it on glass because you're not gonna get the performance you expect. And a lot of people play on a kitchen table, which is either plastic or wood, but some of them have a table cloth. And although I haven't tested it to make sure, I'm sure that the table cloth acts as a filter and denies the dice the ability to do what it does because it doesn't get a direct contact with the wood table underneath. So your talk here with me will help spread the word to people that I sold the dice to and didn't get a chance to explain it 'cause I didn't know myself that there was a problem there. Now I make another five-sided dice, which is actually a 10-sided shape that's numbered one through five in each hemisphere. And so it wouldn't matter what you roll that one on. - That makes sense. So I have to assume that Las Vegas casinos take their dice very seriously. And while they might only be interested in those sort of boring, six-sided dice, I'm wondering how you would compare the precision of your dice to those used in Las Vegas. Obviously they don't have the cost constraints that you might face, or they could probably invest in perhaps a better plastic or whatever the case may be. But in terms of precision, what's your sense of how your dice would compare to theirs? - Well, their dice are machined and my dice are injection molded. And injection molding has a 2% differential in it. And although 2% is not much, the point is federal law requires dice used by casinos for gambling purposes must all have crisp, sharp edges. And the reason is because a cheat can trim one 1,000th of an inch off of one of those edges where he wants the dice to continue in motion. And he doesn't work for a living, he cheats for a living. And one 1,000th of an inch is not very much, but you'll sometimes find people who take dice and they put all the edges against each other and they look to see is there a little hairline crack between them. Because dice who have met the requirement that the feds have put out will provide you with one continuous, even surface, where one dice ends and the next one begins. Whereas dice that have been tampered with, you're gonna see this little hairline crack. - Yeah, that makes sense. You'd mention the five-sided dice and I think that not the second version that has the 10 labeled on both sides, but the, let's call it the pure five, is a atypical geometric shape. And so dice. - Yeah, it's. - Okay. - It's like the shape of a VIX cough drop. - Can you tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you've faced in dice that don't necessarily have obvious symmetrical geometric shapes and how you've developed some of those more variable-sided dice? - Well, I did a three-sided dice and I went to Hobby Lobby and I bought a wooden three-sided football and then I came home and I ground three flat surfaces on it and I sent it off to my tool and die maker and I said I want a three-sided dice that looks a lot like this, but be more precise about exactly where those grinded flat sides are 'cause I'm just doing it by hand and by eye. I don't have any tools to measure for such an undertaking. I said to him, I want you to put the numbers out of the tips, one, two, three. And then in the center, I want you to put the letters RPS and R stands for rock, P stands for paper and S stands for scissors. So there are people who play a vampire and that's a role-playing game and you're supposed to use the rock paper scissors routine to determine the outcome of battles. But there are people who will cheat and play slow draw and drag their hand out in a slower way so that they can see what it is you've got on your fingers and then they can change their result and cheat you during a combat simulation. - Yeah. - But with a three-sided dice, there's no cheating involved. You either, you set up what it is that's gonna be your outcome and cover it with your hand and that's it, so Mr. Cheater can't do that anymore. - Yeah, that's actually the first place I started seeing your three-sided dice was at LARP's. Someone had, for that very reason. And I know even recently there was an article some Japanese scientists have invented a machine that can always win perfectly at rock paper scissors because it uses a high-speed camera and can see the humans move and then switch its move quicker than the eye can detect it. - Oh, I had not heard about that, that's amazing. - Yeah, it's really clever work they've done. But what someone had done when I first saw the three-siders was they'd taken a clear pill box, you know, like the month, if you have to schedule your pill taking very carefully and they hit all each slot with a three-sided dice and they just shake it. So that way they're at a live action role-playing event. They don't have to, I don't know, go to the ground or a table. They just pull that out, give it a good shake and there you have your values. - Okay, well, when I got the seven-sided dice, I thought it was biased and without testing it, I mailed it back to the guy who invented it and said to him, "Because the six and seven faces are so large, "this dice is obviously biased "and will not give equal access to all the digits." And he mailed the dice back to me and he said, "The reason you see what you see "is because when I made this dice the first time, "I did make it larger and the six and the seven faces "around the pentagon, whereas the one, two, three, "just three, four, five is around the edges." Okay? And he said, "I rolled it 10,000 times "and realized it was too thick, "so I milled at one 10,000th of an inch off the dice "and I rolled it another 10,000 times, "milled off one 10,000th of an inch, "rolled it another 10,000 times." And he kept, and I thought, "Oh my God, "what an amount of effort this guy put forward "to get the shape he's got." So I was going to a convention in Las Vegas on the plane, I had sat next to a young guy and I said to him, "Did you ever play Dungeons and Dragons?" And he said, "Well, I did when I was in college, "but I don't anymore." And I said, "Well, that's fine. "I've got some strange dice here that I'd like to test "and we got nothing to do for the next four hours. "Would you mind rolling these dice a hundred times "and telling me the numbers you're getting? "Then I'll pull out a little pad and paper "and I'll write down how they're performing." So he rolled the dice a hundred times and read off the numbers, and I wrote them down and I discovered that on that 100 test roll, those dice had given me equal access to all the faces they had. So when I went to conventions to sell these seven-sided dice, I encountered people who did the same thing I did. They, out of hand, looked and saw that the six and the seven faces were larger and said, "This dice is not going to roll "and give me equal access to all the digits." And I said, "Yes, it will. "I tested it. "Yes, it will. "I tested it." I couldn't, I had this argument in five minute discussion every time somebody came up and looked at them. So finally, I made a big sign and it says, "Well, I'll pay you a dollar every time "you roll some number that's not six or seven. "If you pay me two dollars every time you fail." - Uh-huh. - Can you say that? - Yeah, so the first kid in the door says, "Boy, am I going to make money off of you? "Here's my dollar. "Here's my dollar." I said, "No, no, no, no. "Wait, wait, wait, wait. "This is a trap. "Watch." And I rolled six dice and I said, "See, you'd owe me two dollars right now." And he said, "No, no, no. "You didn't throw them right." I said, "Watch." And I picked them up and I threw them again. "Now you'd owe me four dollars." "No, no, no. "Here's my dollar. "Take my dollar. "I'm going to make money off of you." And so he rolls the dice and he loses. It was like watching lemies throwing themselves in the ocean. (laughs) - I was going to ask you if you could tell us what the Zakihedrin is? - Well, it's a 100-sided dice that's got the numbers from one to 100 all over its surface. And the very first ones that I made, it took me about three years before my tool and die maker could gather all the materials and special tools that he needed to get it. And when he mailed me my first one, I was going to a dance that night and out of excitement. You know, I took it with me and I showed it to the first lady I saw. And I said, "Look at that. "It's a 100-sided dice." And she looked at it for a long time and then handed it back and said, "You know, "if you could figure out how to cut off "and throw away 94 of those sides, "you'd have a dice people could use." (laughs) So that was my, the reaction most people gave me to the 100-sided dice. But in the original Dungeons and Dragons, there was like 350 uses for the D100. The dice is so perfectly balanced that if you roll it on a equator, it's going to stay on the equator till it uses all the energy it has. I didn't think about that when I was numbering the first production run. I put one, two at the North Pole, three, four at the South Pole, five, six at the North Pole and back and forth, back and forth till I used up all the numbers and I had like 34 to 67 left over, which went into the equator. With a layout like that, if you needed a mid-range number, you just rolled it on the equator and that's all you could ever get. And later it crossed my mind. That was not as good a way to lay it out. And so what I did was I went back, well, we had another problem. The first was that the ball inside with the numbers on it would rotate slightly and the number would not be under the flat that was on the outer ball. So my mold maker went to work to find how to solve that problem and he did. We only had one pin that was anchoring the North Pole and one pin anchoring the South Pole, but when he put two pins into the North and two into the South, that anchored it and it wouldn't rotate anymore. So then I said to him, okay, make all the new dice with blue ink because the first ones we made were black ink and I had been testing in my store and people could read dice that had blue numbers on them from a greater distance than they could read the dice that had black numbers. Anyway, so in addition to changing the color of the imprint on the dice, I renumbered it and I tried to make sure that there was a number from every 10 group on every ring that went around the dice. You know, like if you look at the first ring around the dice that's got a 99 in it and the next ring has got a 98 and the next ring has got a 97 and so forth. And then I tried to also put one digit from the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s and so forth into each ring so that you always had a chance of getting a high number as well as a low number and that's the way it's laid out now. But if you want to get a 100, I ask people, show me how you're gonna roll a 100. They put it in their hand and they shake their hand and throw it just like they throw craps. And I tell them, you can't get a 100 doing that. What you gotta do is make sure that the 100 is face up when you release that die because if it rolls four and a half inches and stops, it'll stop on the 100. But a roll of four and a half inches looks like you're cheating. - Sure. - You just kind of let it roll out of your hand and it goes a very short distance and stops. So I said, try to practice rolling nine inches because that looks like a really fair roll. And that way, you've got a chance of making the 100 come up and even if you roll a little further, you're gonna get a 99 or a 98 or a 97. So it's not bad to roll beyond nine inches to make sure you get at least nine inches on that roll. - Well, I've got one. I keep it at work because with 100 sides, it's great for making analogies to probabilities where things are between zero and 100. I have to go check and see which edition I've got now. I didn't realize there were variants. - Yeah, well, and so if you got one with black digits, you can tell everybody, this is the first printing. But then on the other hand, you also know you need to roll it with the number one record facing up and that'll give you a better chance. - So I believe you're also a game designer. Can you tell me a bit about some of the games you've developed? - Well, the first published game I designed was called the Battle of Britain. It simulates the Battle of Britain and the player who has the German forces has all of the Luftwaffe aircraft that Goring was in command of. And what he's got to do is gain air superiority over the RAF so that the invasion can take place 'cause Hitler wasn't gonna send his troops across that 20 mile stretch of water unless he could make sure that they had a reasonable chance of coming out on the other side. And then the next game I did was called Flying Tigers. Then I published a game called Luftwaffe for the Avalon Hill Company. And I was really surprised to discover that in its entire lifespan as an Avalon Hill game, it was always in the top 10 best sellers. Then I did another title called Advanced Fighter and Basic Fighter and they won a gamma award as the best air combat rules of all times. And then I did another one called Alien Space and Starfleet Battle Manual. Those were like Star Trek games. And then I did. There was a designer named Jeff Dee who was working for TSR and he was responsible for designing better and more elegant versions of the game. But he got the thinking about the fact that there's lots of people that don't have more than 100 hours that they can sit down and study those rules. And so he made something called the World's Easiest Role Playing System. T-W-E-R-P-S stands for World's Easiest Role Playing System. And he would just run them off on the Xerox machine and sell them for a very low price. And I like the idea because I sold Dungeons and Dragons from day one. And I sold lots of copies to people who never came back. And I think the reason they never came back is because after they did like 100 hours worth of study, they said, "I can't remember all of this. "This is just too challenging." And so they quit right there. But Twerps only has four rules, and I rewrote the basic game so that you don't need to know any of the four rules to run the first adventure. And as you run the adventure, you're going to find paragraphs that have a big black box around them. And when you come upon that, you don't say anything to the players about that big black box, because that's got a rule in it that you need to make a decision, and they don't need to know how you're making your decisions. And as you go through the story, it says, "Pick one, two, or three below." Well, if you pick number one every time, the story makes complete sense all the way to its end. But if you run the story the next time, and you pick number two and number three at the end of the story, you have to create a new ending for it. And so you're slowly building up your skill at improvising and making up stories. And so it's like when you go to the swimming pool, you don't just jump in all at once, you put your foot in, then you put your ankle in, then you put your leg in, then you put your thigh in, and so forth. Slowly, slowly. And so each time you run this game, since you can pick one, two, or three below, I guess you could run this game about nine times before you exhaust all of the ways that it could be run. And it comes with all the characters that you need for the adventure, but it also provides you with an equal number of characters who are not in the adventure. And the reason those other characters are there is because those are characters you could use for creating the new storyline. And every character in the game has a pun for a name. Like the Kung Fu Dragons is a story about a Chinese magician whose name is Fu Lang Yu. And he has a Chinese dog named Baichishin. And he's fighting a Chinese bandit named Cao Gu Moo. And unfortunately, we went to press with that before I thought of saying, you know, he should also have a beautiful lady assistant whose name is Miss Direction. Oh, that would have been great as well. Yeah. And he should have a male assistant named Ling King Ring. [LAUGHS] So anyway, these twerps and ventures also for $5 each, which I think any kid could get, you know, by mowing the lawn. Whereas if you want to get into basic dungeons and dragons, I think the basic rule book now is $25 or $30. And then you've got to have a player's handbook and a creature's manual and so forth and so on. By the time you get all the equipment necessary, you've spent over $100. And I think there's a lot of kids that don't have the 100, but there's a lot of kids. There's a lot more that have the five. So where could listeners get their hands on some of your games or in particular get their own set of game science dice? Well, at the moment, we're setting up a website. And we don't have any dice to sell because we just got in our tools back into our own hands. And so it's going to take some time to get those tools put back into a machine and then start spitting out, you know, like I was making 17 gem colors and about 12 opaque colors. We can't run every single color all in one day. It takes like two days or three days to do a single color. So you can see it's going to take us quite a while to get the full array back. And the other thing is I'm thinking, you know, like there are colors that don't sell very well, like mint, you know, like who wants mint, you know, very few people. So why bother making it again? Let's just go on and do the ones that sell the fastest first. Yeah, shoot me an email whenever you guys are up and running and I'll put it in, you know, whatever episode's coming out then. So if people are interested, they can go out and get a new set. I appreciate you telling me that. Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to comment on or promote that you think the listeners might appreciate? Well, the D total is a remarkable dice because if you use it in a game, you don't need any other dice. This dice will do everything. But a feature that a lot of people don't know is that it's easy to read. At first you look at it and you can't figure out what's going on because it's got 24 faces on it. So the numbers one through 24 are in the center of the dice. The other thing is it's laid out like a watch. You know where the three o'clock position is. And if you look at three o'clock on the face of this dice, you'll see one, two, or three dots because that's the result of rolling it like a three-sided dice. And right below three o'clock is four o'clock. And there's a picture of a triangle there with a number inside the triangle. And that's what you got from rolling it as a four-sided dice. At five o'clock is a Roman numeral. And that's what you got from rolling it as a five-sided dice. At six o'clock is a square, which is the shape of a six-sided dice. And inside that square is a number that tells what you got if you rolled it as a six-sided dice. At seven o'clock, there's a number that's seven or less. And at eight o'clock, there's a diamond-shaped, eight-sided dice. And at 12 o'clock is a pentagon, which is the shape of a 12-sided dice. So even though you don't have one of these dice to look at, when you finally get your hands on one, you remember the watch and you'll know how to read all the digits on it. Now, the cool part is when a game master rolls this to get some information, there are eight elements of information he could be pulling off the roll. And no player at that table knows which of them it is that he's using to tell them what he's told them, right? So they don't have any way to argue with him. So the game is gonna flow a lot faster. And how I came to make this, 'cause I already have a 24-sided dice. I got a call from Kevin Cook, who has the world's largest dice collection. And at last conversation with him, he had more than 50,000 dice. And he's in the Guinness Book of Records. And he told me that he had been sent a 24-sided dice by a guy in France named Frank Du Train. And the guy in France had wanted to go into the dice business, but he couldn't do so because it had taken him years to save up the $10,000 necessary to build the first tool. And when he paid the tool and die maker to generate this shape, the tool and die maker ran 30 copies of the dice and told him, don't come back unless you're willing to have us do a 10,000-unit run, and it's gonna cost you a dollar a dice to do it. Well, it had taken him so long to get the first $10,000, and there's no way the 30 dice samples he had would be an adequate way by which he could raise another $10,000. - Right. - So he asked Kevin, is there anybody you know that would be interested in buying my tool? So Kevin told me, and I asked him to mail me a copy of the tool. And a few days later, I got a telephone call from England from Dr. Alexander Simkin. And he said to me, I've invented a dice that can roll four different numbers at the same time. Would you be interested in looking at it? I said, sure, mail me a sample. His sample and the sample from France arrived on the same day, and to my amazement, they were both exactly the same size, except that Simkin's dice was made out of cardboard, and the one from France was made out of plastic. So I negotiated with Frank DuTrain and bought his tool, and Simkin had asked me how did I like the way he had laid out the four shapes on the, and I said to him, you've got him helter-skelter all over the face of this dice. If you laid them out like it was a wristwatch, it would be a lot easier for people to remember and to read. So he made me another prototype, but while doing so, then he added four more dice shapes to the layout. Now, you know, so he, like the first time, he didn't show me how to do it like a five-sided outcome. That's how it came to pass that I was a co-designer of the, the total. - Well, this has been a really fun conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. I'm sure the listeners are gonna be really interested to hear about some of the challenges you face and the steps to produce dice that are worthy that any statistician would wanna roll. - Yeah, and I'm pleased that you gave me this opportunity, to my, I've encountered a number of statisticians who use just any dice that they can get their hands on and they didn't realize that many of the polyhedra dice shapes with rounded edges are egg-shaped and are in perverting the outcomes because they don't give the roller an equal chance at all the digits. - Yeah, I do a seminar at conventions where they let me and it's called how to roll winning numbers. And I tell people things they don't know about the dice so that the dice will perform better, just like I told you, rolling the 100 to start with that number 100 facing up. - Yeah, yeah. - Are there any scheduled dates coming up where someone might be able to see you do that? - If Steve Jackson participates in the comic time that they have scheduled for Austin, Texas on the 11th, no, the 11th and 12th of October. That's where I'm gonna go. - Well, maybe some of my Austin listeners or even anyone who's traveling for that convention will get a chance to come by and say hello. - Yeah, well, especially if they, what's going on is the people running the comic-con have been trying to merge comic-con with gaming. And so I've given them a list of the major game manufacturers in the United States and Steve Jackson is based right there in Austin. If Steve chooses to attend, then that I think will swell the attendance they can anticipate dramatically. And so that's why I'm saying if Steve Jackson exhibits there, otherwise it's really a long distance to go for only two days. - Well, thanks again so much. This has been a lot of fun and I enjoy the rest of your weekend. - Well, thank you for the option. (upbeat music) - Lewis and I kept an email chat going after the recording. And he sent me a few great references I wanted to share. You can find all these links in the show notes at datasciptic.com. Lewis referred me to some really good empirical testing that was done independently by awesome dice.com, which compares the fairness of game science dice to one of the leading competitors. Also, if anyone is interested or knows of further work done testing dice, Lewis would love to be in touch and ask that I give his email, which is Lewis Saki, L-O-U-I-S-Z-O-C-C-H-I at Yahoo.com. Additionally, Lewis will be appearing at the Nashville Comic-Con September 26th, 27th and 28th. That's 2014 for anyone listening in the distant future. He'll be giving a free seminar called How to Roll Winning Numbers. If you're planning to be in attendance, please let him know that you heard him on the Datasciptic Podcast. Thanks again for listening to another episode of the Datasciptic Podcast. Please remember to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher or your podcasting place of choice, mind being the podcast republic app for the Android platform. While you're there, if you would, please give a review of the show. That's the best way you can show your appreciation and help other people find it. I don't have that many reviews right now and anyone who would be willing to contribute one would be infinitely appreciated by me. Thank you and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]