Main Screen Last summer I wrote an Android app. It was my first Java in more than a decade and mostly my intent was to figure out what this platform was all about. I needed something fairly easy but it still had to touch on many aspects of the user interface and use enough API calls to be a good learning vehicle. A dice bias/fairness testing app seemed a good fit.

The idea for this sprung from my recent use of dice for Bitcoin wallet seed generation. I had done a bit of research into whether dice were good for this or had noticeable bias. I came across an exellent pair of blogs posts on Delta's D&D Hotspot from several years earlier, where he laid out the details of using Pearson's Chi-Square Test for evaluating dice. A later post also goes into more detail about the "power" of this test. Both are well worth reading if you care about evaluating dice bias and the math behind it.

I'm not much of a mathematician. I could never really handle the theorems and proofs side but I was not bad at actually using calculus, differential equations and linear algebra. I gathered enough from the above articles to move ahead and work out the code for the basic math for this app. To the best of my knowledge, and from testing, it appears to work correctly. Regardless, I have had a couple responses from users where they are greatly disappointed in the fairness of common (usually cheap round edged) dice.

The overall idea was that using the Chi-Square test meant jotting down dice values from a large set of rolls, and then doing a few calculations to give a statistical indicator of fairness. Stats Screen It seemed like an app could save the manual work, and also allow for keeping a dice log so that you could keep doing an ongoing evaluation (while using the dice in a game of some sort). This is what apps are good for - removing the grunt work.

Having coded it up over a few days I tested a few dice and some coins. Then I promptly put it aside and forgot about it. Come around to December and I thought why not put this up in the app store for others to use? That's when I discovered you actually have to pay to put an app on the Google App Store, and I wasn't too much interested in that. I did check a few other options and found I could put it on Amazon for free. So that's what I did. Over the next month I think I had one single download. Obviously there isn't much interest in Dice Testing, or maybe Amazon App Store isn't popular, or both possibilties combined.

After coming across some dice questions on /r/Bitcoin last month I also put up on Github the same signed APK for reddit users to test out. I kind of hinted at eventually releasing the source code. Today I finally added an MIT open source license and put up everything (with signed APK for those not wanting to build it). All part of my new efforts to be more social, build up a web presence, or in other words "actually do something" for a change. I think I'll also look at submitting it to F-Droid as well - but they make it sound somewhat arduous.

Maybe some netizens will actually build it, use it, test'em dice. Let me know if you do. Cheers.


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