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Cover of Cinco mil años tirando huesos

Cinco mil años tirando huesos

From the knucklebone to the quantum generator

A bronze tower for rolling dice so that no hand can cheat. It is neither a weapon nor a cult object, and it carries an engraved promise, play without worry. This book tells the story of that promise and of what it takes to keep it.

For five thousand years we have drawn lots for inheritances, blame, public offices and decisions of war, first with a sheep’s bone and today with the noise of a diode. Producing chance was never the problem, because the world makes it on its own and gives it away. The problem, from the first Neolithic shepherd to the latest cryptographer, has always been knowing that nobody tampered with it.

The journey runs from the lead filled knucklebone to the back door the NSA hid in a worldwide standard, and from the games of solitaire of a convalescent mathematician, which ended up giving us the Monte Carlo method, to quantum generators that publish proof of everything they do. No formulas and no shortcuts. It ends where it began, in front of a machine that no longer asks to be believed, but to be checked.

Written in Spanish.

Published
Pages
208
ISBN
979-8188624507
View on Amazon

Parts of the book

  1. 1 La necesidad del azar
  2. 2 La física del azar verdadero
  3. 3 La traición
  4. 4 Confianza sin fe

From the book

«En el Museo Regional Renano de Bonn se conserva una máquina romana del siglo IV.»

«Una pedía que la creyeran. La otra pide que la comprueben.»

Related

Fig. 1The Froitzheim tower

Tap the tower to roll and drag it to turn itRolled 4 · 1 · 6 · total 11

The Rhineland Regional Museum in Bonn keeps this fourth century tower, found at a villa in Vettweiß-Froitzheim. It is 22.5 cm tall and 9.5 cm a side, and it is made of almost pure copper sheet, although it is usually called bronze. Its walls are pierced. Two of its three corrugated plates survive inside, riveted in turn to the back wall and to the front one, and the lowest comes out at the base as a stair. The top plate is the museum’s restoration. Above the exit there are three slots where little bells may have hung. The front says “Picts beaten, enemy wiped out, play without care”. The pierced pattern is simplified. The fall runs in slow motion and the result is drawn for real in your browser. Martial had already said it of a tower like this one. The hand that knows how to set the die, if it throws through the tower, gets nothing but wishes.