DiceBot 5000

Here’s a trick any of you with an iPhone can do. It just uses a free app.

I got very lucky with this trick. I got it set up on my phone and I was thinking of how I might get into the trick in the future. It’s a trick that uses dice, so it would be good for a game night or something like that. Other than that, how often do dice come up in the real world?

Two hours after I got this ready on my phone, I was sitting with a friend of mine trying to figure out where we wanted to go for dinner. We were in one of those semi-annoying states where we were hungry, but weren’t being called to any particular restaurant or cuisine. We had narrowed it down to a few places.

“Let’s roll a dice to choose one,” she said.

I know what you’re thinking. “Dice is plural! She should have used the singular, ‘die.’” Yes, I know sweetie, but that wasn’t what I was thinking.

I was thinking, how was it possible that the first day in my entire life that I wanted someone to introduce a die into the interaction was also the one day in my entire life where someone did? The odds of that happening aren’t quite matching-Rubik’s-cube-odds, but it’s way more unlikely than Any-Card-At-Any-Number odds.

She grabbed a Yahtzee box from her closet and took out some dice.

I picked one up and looked at it closely for a moment.

“What the heck… wait… why do you have these?”

“Huh?” she said.

“Why do you have these dice?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They came with the game.”

“Noooo, they didn’t,” I said, eyeing her suspiciously.

“Well, as far as I know, they did,” she said.

“Not these dice. These are like $450 a piece.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked.

“You can tell by the diameter of the spots that these are the rigged ones. These are those programmable dice. I had one once too. But I couldn’t afford five. That’s crazy.”

She looked at me like, No, you’re crazy.

Still looking at the die, I said, “Do you seriously not know what these are? I still have the app, I think.”

I told her to choose one of the dice while I looked for something on my phone.

“Here it is. Let me connect it.” I touched the die to my phone.

“Let me just program this…,” my voice trailed off as I did something on my phone.

I had her hold out her hand and I set the phone face-down on her hand. “Okay, roll the die.” She rolled a four

“Turn over my phone,” I said.

On the screen she saw…

“You didn’t know these were those bluetooth dice? Really? Who else has access to your Yahtzee game?

“Here… try this,” I said, as I punched something else into my phone and set it aside.

“Roll all of the dice. Take any three that you want and stack them up in any order. Then cover them with the dice cup.”

I turned my phone over and showed her this.

“This is the three dice stack mode. They roll pretty much like normal dice, yeah? And you stacked them seemingly however you wanted. But if we count all the spots on the outside of the stacked dice, we should get a total of 48.”

She lifts the cup and we count the spots on the 13 visible sides.

17+4+13+8+the 6 on top =

48

“Just be careful with those, that’s almost like $2500 worth of dice.

We eventually rolled one final die to choose our dinner. It was Mexican.

Method

The method here is Marc Kerstein’s free TimedOut app which I mentioned earlier this month.

Phase One

Set an image grid in the TimedOut app with these images.

The rest is self-explanatory.

Phase Two

Set an image grid in the TimedOut app with these images.

All you need to note is the number on the top of the dice stack before it’s covered up. That will tell you which out you need. It doesn’t matter the orientation of all the other dice. The (visible) sides will add up to 43-48. Only the top number matters.

My first introduction to this principle was in a book I read years ago. It was either a magic or math book with some magic for the public. You would have someone stack three dice and cover them up. You would also have 48 toothpicks in your pocket. You’d bring out all the toothpicks except [6 minus the number on the top die]. So if there was a two on the top die, you'd leave four in your pocket. The number of toothpicks in your pocket matched the number of visible spots on the dice. What is the point of the trick where the number of toothpicks in your pocket matches the spots on dice? Bitch, I didn’t make up that trick. I don’t know. I’m just using the same principle.

The nice thing about it is that it’s still a 1 in 6 out, but it seems like it should be much more.

Phone Placement

I put the phone on the spectator’s hand for the first phase.

For the second phase, I rest the phone on something on the table (for the app to work, the phone can’t be flush on the table). A book or a deck of cards works very well. In this instance, I just set in on the Yahtzee box.

Image Grid

TimedOut isn’t really designed to mimic a fake iPhone app. But if you put the provided images into the “image grid” section, that works fine. You just don’t show the spectator anything on your screen before you set the phone down.

There you go. Now you have the elements you need.

Thanks again to Marc for making this app available for free.