The Yahtzee Problem
My wife and I play Yahtzee every now and then. At some point I started noticing I was rolling Yahtzees more than seemed reasonable — and almost always with fives. At first I chalked it up to confirmation bias. But the nagging feeling didn't go away.
So I started asking the more interesting question: how would you even measure that?
You can't just roll a die a few times and declare it biased. You need volume — hundreds of rolls, tracked faithfully, with something that can actually read the result. Manual counting was a non-starter. I wanted data, not a weekend of tally marks.
That question opened the door to a bigger one: could I build something to answer it? What would it take — mechanically, optically, computationally? And once I was building it, why limit it to one kind of dice? The Yahtzee set sparked the idea, but the machine I was imagining could work on any type of dice with any number of faces.
This project is the attempt to find out.