Dice-O-Matic
Here is a guy who runs a games-by-email service and needs random numbers. Lots of them. So he built an automatic dice roller that rolls dice, runs them past a video camera, and reads the results. 1.3 million rolls a day.
Generating random numbers is a hard problem, and there are some philosophical issues (determinism, etc.) as to whether a series of numbers is “truly random”. On the other hand, all sorts of information is available, and there are even hardware gadgets that you can plug into a PC that will generate random numbers from things like thermal noise in resistors. There are open source statistical programs that will test your data for randomness.
My view is that “random is as random does”. If the data passes the statistical tests for randomness, it’s random, even if it “really” came from a deterministic source. If the data doesn’t pass the statistical tests, it’s not random, even if it came from a “truly random” quantum source.
Mr. Dice-O-Matic seems to be blissfully unaware of the state of the art. He’s put all his effort into building his contraption and none (as far as I can tell) into testing the output. How random are his dice rolls? No one knows, because he didn’t test them. His policy:
There is no doubt that I will still receive complaints about the rolls, but now I can honestly say I have done all that I can possibly do: the rolls you get are exactly as random as those you would get throwing by hand. As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice.