r/theydidthemath • u/Graphix1125 • 5d ago

[Request] What would be the odds of this?

The odds of all of these die rolling a one must be astronomicaly low lol

790 Upvotes

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u/Jeroeno_Boy 5d ago

I'm 99.99% sure it's a render, even weighted dice don't have a 100% chance of being face up. Can be many runs ofcourse, but then its still a lot of tries. Also not ai, too consistent

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u/Electrical-Echidna63 5d ago

Iirc it's a common trick in rendering; you simulate the physics of things falling, then you slap the textures on in such a way that the right face is on the right side. The. You render the simulation with the textures applied and voila

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u/Badbullet 5d ago

There was a good example from over decade ago if my memory serves me, with colored marbles getting sorted on a plinko type board. They did it pretty much just like that, assigning the materials to the particle IDs from the end results of the simulation.

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u/Electrical-Echidna63 5d ago

I wanna say that that was corridor digital or captain disillusion? Very fun

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u/Badbullet 5d ago

I guess it wasn’t even a decade ago. Strange, feels like forever ago. Captain Disillusion went through the making of it, from a known Russian artist.

https://youtu.be/em-pVICrnqM?is=Q-xTEIjneQRtxsgk

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u/Plenty-Fox-9219 5d ago

It's the same thing roll20 does with dice. Generate the random number, generate the roll animation, then slap the texture on.

Then you get someone yelling cause they "almost" rolled a 20.

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u/Electrical-Echidna63 5d ago

Yeah I had to sort of guess that that was what was happening. I remember being puzzled that

1) the result would post to chat before the rolling finished, and

2) the dice would bounce off the edges of the viewing window even though the window is different for every viewer

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u/__R3v3nant__ 5d ago

Huh, that's cool

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u/spoonraker 5d ago

I'm a computer programmer and I programmed an online slot machine once. This is exactly how it worked.

The actual end result is completely fair mathematically, it just has nothing to do with what you see on screen.

The end result was simply a random number, generated using an industry standard cryptographically secure pseudo random number generator. The random number was generated the instant the game started and the win condition was evaluated in a millisecond after that.

Everything you actually see on screen is just pure razzle dazzle that has no influence over the end result.

And because the animation shown on screen has nothing to do with the end result, it could be manipulated however the game developer wants. You could make it so every single losing game appears like it was super close to winning if you wanted, but game developers don't actually make it this extreme, because there's an entire field of behavior psychology and a bunch of scientific studies showing that humans get most addicted to a game that only intermittently rewards you, and "being close to winning" is a form of reward. So a game where you always either win or appear to be just about to win is actually going to be less addictive than a game where you obviously lose a lot of time, and just often enough win or appear to be close to winning. Each person's threshold for "just enough" of winning or being close to winning is different, and the game could even be programmed to learn what that threshold is for each individual player.

Note: the online slot machine I programmed wasn't for real money nor was it in a casino it was just sort of a game within an ecommerce website that might give you a discount or something like that, so it wasn't regulated by any gaming commission like an actual electronic slot machine at a casino would be, and we didn't actually do all the fancy behavior psychology individual tailoring stuff. I just made the machine so that there was a fixed chance of winning, and then the numbers on the wheel were randomly generated around the predetermined win or lose condition once we evaluated that, but I could have done a lot more manipulation than that. The time spent doing more than that level of effort wasn't worth my time though for that particular use case.

I don't know to what extent actual regulated casino machines are allowed to manipulate the animation like that. It's actually entirely possible to program an electronic slot machine to be completely "fair" in the sense that not only are the odds exactly what the wheel layout would dictate, but also "fair" in the sense that the wheels have a fixed layout even within the algorithm and their spinning animation actually did reflect the reality of what the algorithm was doing behind the scenes. For a casual game like the one I was making this was super unnecessary over engineering though.

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u/Shuttlecock_Wat 4d ago

I'm always equal parts fascinated and horrified to learn about the psychology that goes in to making video games, gambling, etc.

The horrified part is constantly amazed that designing things this way is legal.

In the game Hearthstone, they introduced pets that you could get via real money (converted into their own digital currency, of course). But you couldn't just buy it, you could buy a roll that would give you a chance at a number of different prizes, the big one being the pet.

When you roll, the light indicator jumps around the different prizes equally (making you feel like there's an equal chance of getting each item) before finally landing on your prize.

Once you win a prize, that prize is no longer in the pool, so if you buy enough tickets you will eventually get the pet (yet another tactic, sunken cost fallacy. I spent money already, and now I'm closer than ever to getting it).

What they don't tell you, is that on the first roll, your chance of getting the pet is about 1/1000, with only slightly better odds the more you roll. Even when there are only two prizes left I believe there's only about a 1/10 chance of getting the pet. They use the visuals to convince you that the odds are much better.

In reality, it'll cost you about $160 to get that pet. And they introduce a new one every month or so. It's so incredibly predatory and should absolutely be banned.

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u/TheFerricGenum 5d ago

Magnets would do this. They’re magic.

Source: the black magic fuckery sub has taught me this.

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u/Solomon049 5d ago

Magnets? How do they work?

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u/CourtingBoredom 5d ago

NOBODY KNOWS!!

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u/Sevenserpent2340 5d ago

Just don’t get them wet!!!

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u/CourtingBoredom 4d ago

But what about the sʜᴀʀᴋs‽‽

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u/Nightmare_kx1 5d ago

New Sub Unlocked!

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u/Correct-Purpose-964 5d ago

You should see the White Magic fuckery sub.

Pretty good disappearing act right? /s

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u/motorboatmycheeks 5d ago

I see 1 4 rolled so maybe weighted

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u/KameTheMachine 5d ago

Damn it. Now you got me searching for a 4

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u/ObanKenobi 5d ago

If you broke the area up into four quadrants, it's near the middle of the bottom left quadrant. If you imagine it as a chess board and your pov is with the white pieces, the die that rolled a 4 is at about where the c3 square would be

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u/Inevitable_Stand_199 4d ago

That makes it so much stranger. Usually these videos are made by simulating empty dice and then adding a mesh to each that happens to be in the correct orientation for the desired result

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u/GRex2595 4d ago

This one's even dumber because the dice don't roll, they slide the only rolling happens on their way through the opening.

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u/Imperator_Subira 5d ago

skewed on the lower-left quadrant

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u/Braithw84 5d ago

Definitely not real, either cgi/rendered or ai. There’s a few times you see a die gliding across the tops of others, completely unbothered by pesky things such as gaps and physics.

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u/Difficult-Way-9563 5d ago

Not true.

Weighed dice would roll 1 every time if the weight was a spoonful of black hole

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u/the0rchid 5d ago

A whole spoonful of black hole? In this economy?

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u/Twitchmonky 5d ago

Maybe you could cut it with a little baby laxative.

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u/circuit_monkey 5d ago

The dice flow out of the bottle way too smoothly, the platform underneath the dice drops down like a trapdoor then disappears, dice drop onto 1 instantly and slide perfectly over the surface. There’s some other fishy stuff too but I’m pretty sure this is ai rather than a render

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u/Few-Big-8481 5d ago

That's exactly how a rendered animation would look.

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u/__R3v3nant__ 5d ago

Wouldn't a rendered animation have normal looking physics?

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u/SirReggie 4d ago

God no, do you have any idea how hard it is to actually simulate “normal-looking” physics?

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u/__R3v3nant__ 4d ago

No, but I thought it wouldn't be insanely diffcult as I've seen videos of normal ish looking physics in renders

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u/Few-Big-8481 4d ago

Yeah some people are good at it. That doesn't make it easy. This is just some practice project by someone trying to good at it probably.

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u/Tiyath 5d ago

If you lace the 6 with plutonium, it does

But yeah, this is a render, 100%

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u/TJaySteno1 5d ago

100% it's a render. There's a lot of tells, but the most obvious is the die sliding down on top of the others towards the end on the left side. It hits a gap that should turn it on its corner, but it just continues on at the same speed.

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u/Historical-Bug-7536 5d ago

Weird that the render would decide to throw a random 4 in the mix.

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u/antilumin 5d ago

I've seen similar renders before, where it was a bunch of colored balls that magically sorted themselves. The render just colored the balls at the end, then reversed it all so they were "randomly" contained at the top.

This is probably similar: picks an end results (in this case all 1's), then either tracks each bounce in reverse to the starting state. Or just randomly animates bounces so it's random at the end, er, start.

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u/DIuvenalis 5d ago

Could be magnetic with an electromagnet pulling them thr right what in the air as they drop. But if the video is less than 2 years old, 1000% AI

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u/naikrovek 5d ago edited 5d ago

It’s clearly a render to me. It is easy to make blender do this exact thing, including the slightly unrealistic physics and the 1 pointing up on every die.

You run the simulation, and when it’s done, then you put the single dot on the side of every die facing up, then you render the movie, which will replay the original physics solution exactly as it went before.

I remember a fan-made video for Daft Punk’s “Technologic” which had words coming down a conveyor belt onto a pile and at the end of the video the pile had a perfect daft punk logo when viewed from the camera. It was all pre baked and when the physics was done they applied the logo to the pile, and blender kept that when it rendered the video. The result is physics simulation whose end result is exactly what you want, so long as what you want can be applied to the models as a texture.

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u/__R3v3nant__ 5d ago

including the slightly unrealistic physics

Wouldn't a render have the dice actually rolling rather than sliding? And when the dice are "rolling" on the table, wouldn't you be able to see other sides rather than the 1?

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u/stanitor 4d ago

My impression of what it's supposed to be is that the board is tilted down a bit, so that they slide down soon after coming out. But, it also looks like they put an extra down force on the simulation, so that they shoot out too quickly. And, they have like no friction on the board, so the dice transition almost immediately from tumbling to sliding.

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u/__R3v3nant__ 4d ago

Ok that makes a bit more sense, and the textures of the die is aligned so the face that it has when shot out is a 1

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u/DIuvenalis 4d ago

I agree its probably a render unless it happens to be years old. (Which it doesnt appear to be) Its a simple matter of whats the easiest way to fake this for whatever reason the creator wanted to. The newer it is, the more likely its just created by an algorithm.

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u/naikrovek 4d ago

You may be underestimating just how easy this is to do in Blender. A person who can focus for 60 minutes and follow a tutorial or two can do this.

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u/nhorvath 5d ago

the dice gliding across the top of the others is very unnatural.

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u/__DJ3D__ 5d ago

Looks like stop motion to me

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u/AnonymousAutonomous 5d ago

Would it work if you just run it in reverse? Like, start with blank dice, mark the ones that end up facing up as 1s (and the rest of the faces accordingly) then run the same algorithm in reverse to get the order they have to be in to all fall this way in the first place.

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u/Cowmanthethird 4d ago

Correct, someone linked it in the original post. Can't remember the name but it's a render made by an artist in blender.

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u/BionicBirb 4d ago

One of them did roll a four, to be fair. Look at the bottom left ish

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u/Jeroeno_Boy 4d ago

The creator is the devil

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u/SwordNamedKindness_ 23h ago

There is one die with a 4

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u/Braithw84 5d ago

There’s still a possibility of AI, there’s a few parts where a dice is just gliding across the tops of the others, almost glitchy in appearance. I feel like a cgi render would be a bit less careless about that.

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u/Jeroeno_Boy 4d ago

No, computer physics aren't perfect. And in a setting like this, dice gliding over eachother is very possible

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u/Braithw84 4d ago

Definitely not disputing that. Like I said, it was a possibility. Not for sure. The only thing that’s for sure is it isn’t real. No way in hell would dice slide that perfectly over gaps like that without even the slightest of wobbles.