Zocchihedron
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Zocchihedron is the trademark of the 100-sided dice, which was invented by Lou Zocchi, and debuted in 1985. Rather than being a polyhedron, it is more like a ball with 100 flattened planes. It is sometimes called "Zocchi's Golfball."
Zocchihedra are designed to handle percentage rolls in games, particularly in role-playing games.
[edit] History
It took three years for Zocchi to design his dice, and three more years to get it into production. Zocchi discovered that the dice would perform best at a thickness of 13.85 mm. Since its introduction Zocchi has improved the design of the Zocchihedron, filling it with teardrop-shaped free-falling weights to make it settle faster when rolled.
The Zocchihedron II is a further improved model, and has a different filling material.
[edit] Probability distribution of rolls
A test performed by Jason Mills for White Dwarf magazine concluded that the frequency distribution of the Zocchihedron was substantially uneven, 5,164 rolls (binomial distribution dictates that to be confident of an average result on a fair dice the number of trials required (n) is equal to μ ÷ p, where μ = mean, or die average, and p = probability of a single result. n = 5050 for a d100) led Mills to conclude that results greater than 93 or less than 8 are significantly rarer than results between these figures. Mills attributed this to the especially high, and especially low numbers being situated at the poles of the sphere — and thus being closer together. Numbers near the equator are more widely spaced.
Later versions of the Zocchihedron have been designed with a different pattern of number distribution, resulting in more even results overall. Individual numbers still suffer from the bias.[citation needed]
[edit] Patents
The aesthetic appearance of the Zocchihedron was protected by United States design patent D303,553, which expired on 19 September 2003. There was never a utility patent for the original Zocchihedron, although United States patent 6,926,276 may protect the braking mechanism of the Zocchihedron II. That patent will expire on 9 August 2025 and applies only to 100-sided dice containing "multi sized and irregularly shaped particles."
