On Fate and the falling die

Older than writing, almost

Some of the oldest dice we know of were found at Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City, in eastern Iran, with a game board around five thousand years old. Before cubes there were knucklebones: the small ankle bones of sheep and goats, four-sided and never quite fair, thrown by Greek and Roman players and by priests reading omens. The line between a game and a prophecy was always thin.

Why we roll for decisions

A die cannot be flattered, bribed, or tired. When two people both want the last slice, a coin ends the argument without a loser to blame. When you cannot choose between two good roads, the toss does something stranger: in the half second the coin is in the air, you often find out which side you were hoping for.

The economist Steven Levitt tested this in 2016. He asked thousands of people stuck on a big decision, such as quitting a job, to let a coin decide. The ones the coin sent towards change were, on average, happier six months later. Most of us, it seems, wait too long to jump.

Chance learns to count

Gamblers asked the questions first. In the 1500s the physician Gerolamo Cardano, a compulsive player, wrote a book on games of chance that worked out the odds of dice. In 1654 Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat traded letters about how to split the pot of an unfinished game, and probability theory was born of the answer. The same arithmetic now prices insurance, runs weather forecasts, and tells a doctor how far to trust a test.

The shapes are old, too. The Greeks proved there are exactly five solids whose faces are all the same regular polygon, meeting the same way at every corner. All five sit in a gamer’s bag today: the d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20.