Design considerations of an electromechanical dice gambling machine

Using electronic devices in the gambling industry has become increasingly popular over the last few years. First machines employing electromechanical principles were slot machines. Recently, electronic gambling machines which use mechanical motion of various types to produce random numbers have emerged and are used with an increasing interest. Typical representatives are electronic roulette and electronic dice machines. The most important module of an electronic dice machine is detection of dice location and throw-the electronic read-out process of random numbers produced by mechanically thrown dices. Such machines are extremely attractive to users and moreover they provide results visually giving no room to fraudulently acquired numbers. For this purpose the machine as well has to be able to reliably and precisely read the numbers produced. Older detection systems for this kind of machine did not achieve acceptable levels of precision, for example, 99.8% read-out precision is simply not enough. This precision is the single most important factor for such a machine and the authors' approach produced 100% precision and reliability. In their article, they present a novel detection method based on contactless electronic ID keys which are positioned (inserted) on the facets of dice(s). They are identified (read-out) using an array of contactless read-out points implemented as electronic ID key scanners. In this way, one is able to implement highly precise and reliable electronic gambling machines, which use mechanical random number generators (dice throwers)-all in an extremely cost effective manner.