The History of Dice Reflects Beliefs in Fate and Chance - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Dice, in their standard six-sided form, seem like the simplest kind of device—almost a classic embodiment of chance. But a new study of more than 100 examples from the last 2,000 years or so unearthed in the Netherlands shows that they have not always looked exactly the way they do now. What’s more, the shifts in dice’s appearance may reflect people’s changing sense of what exactly is behind a roll—fate, or probability.
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Did it matter to game players that these dice were not fair? “We don’t know for sure,” Eerkens says. The way Romans wrote about dice falls suggests they were regarded as signs of supernatural favor or of a player’s fortune, however. The archaeologist Ellen Swift, in her book Roman Artifacts and Society, writes that high rolls had associations of benevolence and felicity, and that rolling three sixes at the same time seems to have been called a Venus. “Dice potentially played an important role in conceptualizing divine action in the world,” she writes.
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At the same time, dice tend to get smaller, perhaps to make them easier to hide, as gambling was not favored by the increasingly powerful religious authorities. Some of the study’s dice from this era, in fact, were found all together in a small hole in a garbage heap, including one cheater’s die with an extra three. Could it be someone saw the light and forswore dice?
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. In the 17th century, even Galileo writes about why, in a game with three dice, the number 10 should come up more than the number 9. It’s an observation that one would only be able to detect after thousands of rolls, but the reason behind it involves how many combinations of numbers can add up to each different option.
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All these changes in dice come about, says Eerkens, “as different astronomers are coming up with new ideas about the world, and mathematicians are starting to understand numbers and probability.” Which came first: Did people begin to intuitively understand what true chance felt like, and adjusted dice accordingly, or did it trickle out from what would eventually become known as the scientific community?
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And it does make you wonder: Would you know that fair dice should fall equally on each side, or that in a three-dice game, it’s better to bet on 10 than nine, if someone hadn’t told you?