Auburn lecturer’s unique invention gains international attention

Have you ever started a board game and couldn’t figure out the best way to see who goes first?

Well, Auburn lecturer Eric Harshbarger has figured out a permanent solution to that problem.

Harshbarger created the process that led to a set of five 60-sided dice to quickly determine who would go first in a five-person game.

Keep reading to learn more about Harshbarger’s story + the math behind each decision along the way.

How Harshbarger got the attention of The Guardian

Harshbarger, who is now a senior lecturer with the Auburn University College of Science and Mathematics, said he was first approached with this problem at a gaming convention in 2012.

The idea was to find a way for every player to roll a dice to determine who goes first without any ties or re-rolls while giving each dice an equal chance to be the highest number.

And sure, you may be thinking an extra roll or two to determine who goes first may not be a big deal. But once a mathematician is given a problem, you better believe they’re going to work to find the solution.

And that’s what Hashbarger set out to do.

“As with many, many math problems, who cares about the practicality?” he said via Auburn’s website. “Mathematically, this is a pretty interesting question.”

Determining the solution for a two or three-person game did not take long but things got more complicated with four or more players.

Hashbarger worked with longtime friend Robert Ford, an Auburn mathematics alumnus who now teaches at Dalton State College. They found a solution using four 12-sided dice that could never tie, and each player had an equal chance of rolling the highest number.

That discovery gained international attention including a feature in The Guardian. The “Go First Dice” also hit the market for the first time.

But once they solved that, it was time to see if they could create dice for a five-person game.

Creating the unique 60-sided dice

Harshbarger and his colleagues quickly realized a five-person solution would be much more complex than anything they previously worked on.

Again, this wasn’t about just preventing ties from happening. Each die had to have an equal chance of landing on the highest number.

“The sizes of these number spaces are phenomenally big,” Harshbarger said. “You’re getting to numbers like more than the number of atoms in the universe.”

According to the university’s report, a researcher in Indiana put a supercomputer to work searching through possibilities. Three months later, he emailed Harshbarger with an update: they weren’t even close.

The research continued over roughly 15 years and Harshbarger estimated 12 to 20 people contributed to the research. Some were mathematicians, others programmers, from across the United States and as far away as Australia and Canada.

Often, they found the project through Harshbarger’s website.

“I would love to be able to say, ‘Oh, I did all the contributions and made all the advancements,’ but that’s not the case at all,” he said. “Many of us came together with different skill sets and found solutions of different types.”

Different solutions were brought to the table but some were too complex to actually create. A 120-sided dice was built but the crew continued to work for something better.

Nearly 12 years after starting their work, the set of five 60-sided dice was built. And it’s getting even more worldwide attention.

Dice sculpture on display at Auburn

As the research reached its breakthrough, Auburn was building the STEM + Agricultural Sciences Complex, which would become the new home for COSAM. Plans for the $224-million building included finding new ways to represent mathematics in the space visually.

Hashbarger knew he had the perfect idea. He worked with Auburn University to create a giant sculpture of the historic die which are now display at the College of Sciences and Mathematics.