Every now and then someone on one of the boards has an issue with the backgammon dice. Usually the complaint is that someone who was losing rolled a highly improbable cascade of doubles and won at the very end of the game.

I am not a gammon player, but I have done some research on "randomness". It sounds odd to most people, but randomness is actually a subset of the domain of artificial intelligence and programming, and it is important to have certain processes simulate randomness.

For example, a chess program that uses a transposition table to store positions that are encountered frequently can actually stuff more positions into the same amount of RAM with a better random number generator used to stamp the tokens used as the masks. Better randomness in these "hash tables" can also allow for faster retrieval of the data in these RAM buffers.

Getting back to the dice...

I was doing some more research recently, and I also saw this is someone's profile here on BK:

not playing it for a while due to so many losses of people getting stupid double's at the end of the game and winning everything. My favorite game now is froglet and I'll try any other game but backgammon.

Using different ideas from a few papers I read, there is a way to make everyone on here happy, without having that long cascade of doubles, or other scenarios (maybe lots of 1-2 rolls in a row can also be bad.)

Arrange all of the dice like this:

1-1
1-2
1-3
...
6-4
6-5
6-6

Now
, take a poll among the gammon community. What should be the maximum number of rolls of any particular combination that should be tolerated consecutively?

Say, a 6-6 should not be rolled more than 3 times in a row by one player, but maybe a 3-3 or 4-4 can be rolled more often.

Poll the entire community for every roll.

Next, create millions of "tapes" of thousands of consecutive rolls where all of the consecutive criteria are not exceeded, yet all other dice rolls are, for all intents and purposes, purely random.

Every player at the start of every game gets one of these tapes. No two tapes are every re-used.

When you run low on tapes, crank out more.

I know players object to pre-rolled dice, but the good thing is, you won't ever have someone run 8 straight double 6's on you when you are ahead by a mile, nor will you get snagged with 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, when you are almost home.

And, unlike other pre-rolled dice websites, the tapes are destroyed after each use, and never re-used, so the overall result would be "truly random" but with those nasty rolls totally removed.