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A die (plural "dice") is a solid with markings on each of its faces. The faces are usually all the same shape, making Platonic solids and Archimedean duals the obvious choices. The die can be "rolled" by throwing it in the air and allowing it to come to rest on one of its faces. Dice are used in many games of chance as a way of picking random numbers on which to bet, and are used in board or role-playing games to determine the number of spaces to move, results of a conflict, etc. A coin can be viewed as a degenerate 2-sided case of a die.

Dice long predate the modern cube. Four elongated wooden dice from Shahr-e Sukhteh in Iran, dated to roughly 2500-2300 BC, are six-faced parallelepipeds numbered only on their four long faces. They were found with a board for the Game of Twenty Squares and are among the oldest known dice (Piperno and Salvatori 1983).

Greco-Roman Egypt also produced 20-sided dice shaped as icosahedra, including examples labeled with Greek numerals and one first-century example whose faces name 20 Egyptian divinities (Minas-Nerpel 2007, Horster 2017).

In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet (Chuang).

The most common type of die is a six-sided cube with the numbers 1-6 placed on the faces. The value of the roll is indicated by the number of "spots" showing on the top. For the six-sided die, opposite faces are arranged to always sum to seven. This gives two possible mirror image arrangements in which the numbers 1, 2, and 3 may be arranged in a clockwise or counterclockwise order about a corner. Commercial dice may, in fact, have either orientation. The illustrations above show 6-sided dice with counterclockwise and clockwise arrangements, respectively, when viewed from along the three-fold rotation axis towards the center of the die.

The cube has the nice property that there is an upward-pointing face opposite the bottom face from which the value of the "roll" can easily be read. This would not be true, for instance, for a tetrahedral die, which would have to be picked up and turned over to reveal the number underneath (although it could be determined by noting which number 1-4 was not visible on one of the upper three faces). The arrangement of five spots corresponding to a roll of 5 on a six-sided die is called the quincunx. There are also special names for certain rolls of two six-sided dice: two 1s are called snake eyes and two 6s are called Boxcars.

Shapes of dice other than the usual 6-sided cube are commercially available from companies such as Dice & Games, Ltd.® A fair die gives each face outcome equal probability. Isohedra give fairness by symmetry when the mass distribution and rolling experiment respect their face-transitive symmetries. This sufficient condition is distinct from probabilistic fairness. The classification of isohedra includes 30 types, counting infinite families (Pegg 2005).

For positive integers and , consider independent fair -sided dice numbered 1 through . The probability of obtaining the integer total , with , can be computed as follows. Outside this range the probability is 0. The number of ways in which can be obtained is the coefficient of in

since each possible arrangement contributes one term. can be written as a multinomial series

so the desired number is the coefficient of in

Expanding,

so in order to get the coefficient of , include all terms with

Taking binomial coefficients to be 0 outside the combinatorial range, is therefore

But only when , so the other terms do not contribute. Furthermore,

so

where is the floor function, and

(Uspensky 1937, pp. 23-24).

Consider now . For six-sided dice,

and

The most common roll is therefore seen to be a 7, with probability , and the least common rolls are 2 and 12, both with probability 1/36.

For six-sided dice,

and

For three six-sided dice, the most common rolls are 10 and 11, both with probability 1/8; and the least common rolls are 3 and 18, both with probability 1/216.

For four six-sided dice, the most common roll is 14, with probability 73/648; and the least common rolls are 4 and 24, both with probability 1/1296.

In general, a likeliest roll for -sided dice is given by

For and , when is odd and is even, is equally likely. For , all faces are equally likely. The displayed choice can be written explicitly as

For 6-sided dice, the likeliest rolls are given by

or 7, 10, 14, 17, 21, 24, 28, 31, 35, ... for , 3, ... (OEIS A030123) dice. The probabilities corresponding to the most likely rolls can be computed by plugging into the general formula together with

Unfortunately, does not have a simple closed-form expression in terms of and . However, the probabilities of obtaining the likeliest roll totals can be found explicitly for a particular . For 6-sided dice, the probabilities are 1/6, 1/8, 73/648, 65/648, 361/3888, 24017/279936, 7553/93312, ... for , 3, ....

The probabilities for obtaining a given total using 6-sided dice are shown above for , 2, 3, and 4 dice. After centering and scaling, the totals converge in distribution to a normal distribution as the number of dice is increased.

See also

Boxcars, Coin Tossing, Craps, de Méré's Problem, Efron's Dice, Isohedron, Newton-Pepys Problem, Poker, Quincunx, Sicherman Dice, Snake Eyes, Yahtzee

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References

Chuang, J. "Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel." http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Mozart/dice/.Cook, K. "What Shapes Do Dice Have?" https://www.dicecollector.com/diceinfo_how_many_shapes.html.Culin, S. "Tjou-sa-a--Dice." §72 in Games of the Orient: Korea, China, Japan. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, pp. 78-79, 1965.Diaconis, P. and Keller, J. B. "Fair Dice." Amer. Math. Monthly 96, 337-339, 1989.Dice & Games, Ltd. "Poly Dice & Dice for Hobby Games." https://www.dice.co.uk/fs_poly.htm.Evans, D. C. "Coordinate Systems: Right and Left Handed Dice. Right?" http://users.erols.com/ee/dice.htm.Gardner, M. "Dice." Ch. 18 in Mathematical Magic Show: More Puzzles, Games, Diversions, Illusions and Other Mathematical Sleight-of-Mind from Scientific American. New York: Vintage, pp. 251-262, 1978.History of Mathematics Project. "Burnt City Dice." Image: Shahr-e Sokhta archaeological project. https://www.history-of-mathematics.org/artifacts/burnt-city-dice.History of Mathematics Project. "Icosahedral Die with Divine Entities." Image reproduced from Minas-Nerpel (2007), Egypt Exploration Society. https://www.history-of-mathematics.org/artifacts/icosahedral-die-with-divine-entities.History of Mathematics Project. "Serpentinite Icosahedral Die." Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Helen Miller Gould, 1910, object 10.130.1158, public domain. https://www.history-of-mathematics.org/artifacts/serpentinite-icosahedral-die.Horster, G. "Antike Polyeder: Vom Spiel mit Form und Zahl im Ptolemäischen Ägypten zum Kleinod im römischen Europa." Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 132, 2017.Minas-Nerpel, M. "A Demotic Inscribed Icosahedron from Dakhleh Oasis." J. Egyptian Archaeology 93, 137-148, 2007.Numberphile. "Fair Dice (Part 1)." Sep. 14, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7zT9MljJ3Y.Pegg, E. Jr. "Math Games: Fair Dice." May 16, 2005. https://www.mathpuzzle.com/MAA/37-Fair%20Dice/mathgames_05_16_05.html.Pegg, E. Jr. "MathPuzzle: Fair Dice." Dec. 19, 2010. https://www.mathpuzzle.com/Fairdice.htm.Pickover, C. A. The Mathematics of Oz: Mental Gymnastics from beyond the Edge. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 245, 2002.Piperno, M. and Salvatori, S. "Recent Results and New Perspectives from the Research at the Graveyard of Shahr-i Sokhta, Sistan, Iran." Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale 43, 174-191, 1983.Robertson, L. C.; Shortt, R. M.; Landry, S. G. "Dice with Fair Sums." Amer. Math. Monthly 95, 316-328, 1988.Sloane, N. J. A. Sequence A030123 in "The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences."Tietze, H. "Über die Anzahl der stabilen Ruhelagen eines Würfels." Elem. Math. 7, 97-100, 1948.Uspensky, J. V. Introduction to Mathematical Probability. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 23-24, 1937.

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Dice

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Dice." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Dice.html

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