So what about the "randomness?" Being on a losing streak stinks, but part of being truely random means losing streaks (and winning streaks) will happen. Subdice has been tested to ensure that the numbers that come up are truely random. Consider a case of two dice like in Monopoly or Craps. Lets say we play a game that involves 50 rolls of the dice. The odds of rolling a 2 (two 1's) are 2.8%, so we would expect a two to be rolled once or twice in the game. The odds of rolling a 7 are 16.7%, so we would expect a seven to be rolled about 8 times. It is possible though that we could play a game with regular dice and roll a 2 six times and roll a seven only once. If that happened, then we would say that a 2 came up 12% and a 7 came up only 2% of the time. That kind of rolling can happen in the course of a single game using regular dice, and it can happen with Subdice, but why? The reason is that we're only sampling the dice 50 times. That's too small a number. If we roll the dice 5,000,000 times and look at the odds, they'll be much closer to the teoretical values.
Using the same code as that used for Subdice, we wrote a program to do a simple thing: Roll two dice a bunch of times, and count the number of times a 2 or a 7 comes up. We did this twice for the numbers 5, 50 , and 5,000,000. Here are the results:
All the different dice combinations in Subdice have been tested to ensure that the odds are consistent with the teoretical odds.
The genesis of this program started during a very bad losing streak while playing the came Risk one day on a computer. The player wondered if the program or God had something against him. Curiously, the player never got all existential after a winning streak.
This program is now available at the iTunes App Store: View Subdice at iTunes App Store