You can find an online map with some highlighted items here :
This is a "shortened URL" provided via Station X at the Bletchley Park site.
Shortened URLs are very useful and have become more widely used via services such as Twitter. The real URL is MUCH longer and shown here as a comparison. (http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=114780553626409762558.00046da9197c47d1b3213&ll=51.644655,-0.054417&spn=0.040052,0.077162&z=14)
Some of you are probably wondering why people bother with things like dice throwing nowadays, after all, a computer can generate random numbers can't it?
Well - no it can't.
Computers are machines that follow a set of instructions and there is nothing random about them at all.
They can generate pseudo-random numbers - that is a pre-programmed sequence of numbers that appear to be random. But they are NOT random. (Read more about it here.)
You can always use a website like Random.org to create random numbers for you.
Notice how their site explains how they produce random numbers by NOT using a computer.
12-sided dice that have musical notes on their sides. They can be used to add randomness and variety to compositions.
After reading about the 'Dice-o-Matic' featured in the previous article I wondered if I could create my own - much simpler - version. I decided to use the 'Scratch' program so that I could easily post any working project for others to see and share. This one - version 4 - has two sets of dice. There are plenty of notes within the various dice projects to see how I achieved it.
Three versions - 5, 6 and 7 - do not appear to work via the website but if you register on the Scratch site you can download them and see what else I did.
You can see all versions of my dice project at CCS-PK's Dice Gallery.
The 'Games by Email' site needed to generate a lot of dice throws and originally built their own out of LEGO and other bits - as you can see in the picture above. It was capable of generating more than 50,000 rolls per day. (Read more about it here.)
As their site got busier they needed a more capable system still - one able to produce over a million rolls per day. For that they created the "Dice-o-Matic" which can actually provide 1,300,000 rolls per day. You can see it in action in the video below and read more about it here.