Cooking Dice
DECEPTIONPosted by Daniel Madison 19 Mar, 2010 02:32PM
Of the many methods for cheating with Dice I wanted to share with you a study I carried out on the idea of 'Cooking the Dice.' Cooking Dice is a method for making Loaded Dice. A loaded die is a die that has been tampered with to ensure that it always lands on the same face, there are many methods to achieve this, some include rounding off the corners of one face, changing the shape of the die or more commonly making one face heavier than the others; the very objective for Cooking Dice.
The idea behind Cooking Dice is to heat up the die quick enough to cause a 'melt' without actually causing any effect to the shape, which allows the weight of the die adjust to gravity, therefore if you cook a die with the 1 as the up number, the weight will shift down to the 6 making it heavier. To achieve an appropriate application of temperature fast enough to ensure that the shape remains, one must use a microwave...
When cooking your dice, there are many things that can go wrong, and I've made all of those mistakes so that you don't have to. I have no call to use Western Style Dice; these are the smaller solid red die with rounded edges and corners; usually used for board-games, the only dice I use are Precision Casino Dice, which are completely square and often clear or frosted in colour, and therefore this practice is only meant for casino dice.
In the image above, the first (Red Golden Nugget) die saw 6 minutes in the centre of a 850w microwave, and the Blue Binion die next to it saw 5 minutes at the same temp; two fine examples of over-cooked dice... as my microwave has no temp-adjutment-setting the experiment continued at the same temp, but each die saw less time.
The 3rd die (Amber Harrah's) saw 3 and a half minutes and the Red Harrah's saw 3 minutes; each seemed to collect air-bubbles at the bottom, which expanded rather rapidly. The Green Binnion Die (5th from the left) saw 2 and a half minutes and the same thing happened. It was at this point that the plan changed. (CLICK HERE to see a clearer image of the Dice.)
The Green Binnion die (2nd from the right) saw 6 minutes, 1 minute 30 seconds at a time, after each blast I allowed a minute for cool-down before the next. Although this was going quite well,air-bubbles appeared at the bottom, and so joined the other dice in the fail box.
The final Amber Wynn die on the right, saw 10 minutes, 1 minute at a time with a 1 minute cool-down between each wave. The final result was near perfect... The die has no visual distortions nor a single bubble although you can feel the weight difference when you spin it at adjacent corners. As good as the die turned out, my final thought on Cooked Casino Dice is that the design of these cubes has been built to combat any crooked tampering. The fact that these are perfect squares with sharp corners means that when rolling, a huge act of 'bounce' is caused as each corner or side hits the surface, and so regardless of the weight-adjustment, it's just not enough to compensate or outwit the nature of design vs gravity.
Although with this die the chances of landing a 1 are increased, I rolled the die 50 times and only landed 1 - 18 times; which although at 36% is statistically above average (16.6%) I'd be more incline to put that down to the laws of chance than the implementation of a crooked die; to which I see no advantage of taking the risk involved with playing with such an instrument of deception.
I was left wondering if the design of the Western die would allow for a higher success rate, but with no call to use such dice I'm in no rush to try it out, however my friend Dee Christopher happened to find THIS VIDEO which seems to offer some enlightenment.
Please don't try cooking dice at home as when I did i found myself very dizzy followed by a heavy head-ache and a sickly feeling that stayed with me for at least half a day.
I'll be posting more crooked dice methods here soon. Comments or further information on Cooking Dice more than welcome.
D
(EDITED) >
After posting this entry to the blog, I had a rather interesting thought on the cooking process, interesting results:
- Comments(5)http://blog.danielmadison.co.uk/#post24
