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Why Ancient Romans Used Asymmetrical Dice With Lopsided Probabilities

maximus otter

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Archeologists regularly unearth asymmetrical dice from the Roman Empire. What’s going on here?

The popular game of the day, taberna (similar to backgammon), featured dice made of bone, metal, or clay. With six-sided dice a common archeological find across Europe, the researchers studied 28 well-dated Roman-period dice and found that 24 of them were asymmetrical. Some were so anti-cube-like that the highly parallelepiped dice (meaning all of its faces are parallelograms) had one side over 50 percent longer than the short side! The pair argue that the extreme variation wasn’t meant to even out probabilities, promote a certain number, or even offer up cheater-style dice; it was simply a matter of culture.

“We argue that such extreme variation was acceptable because makers and users understood roll outcomes as the product of fate, rather than chance or probability,” the researchers say in their paper.

The researchers believe the disregard for probability came from the belief in fate ruling the day. Researchers had 23 modern-day students place pips on reproductions of the asymmetrical Roman dice, but without any explanation as to why (that way they couldn’t cheat). Every one of the students in the study started with a 1 on the largest side, which meant the corresponding number added a 6 on the other larger side. Researchers figured this was simply a matter of ease, both from putting the largest number on the largest face and the fact that people start in chronological order.

https://apple.news/AhjNU5O53QXS7WqP04ALiyw

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