Another remarkable example discovered in Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt in the 1980s records an Egyptian god’s name in Demotic (the Egyptian script of these late periods) on each face. According to historians, the numerous ones founds through from the Roman, Greek and Egyptian times are mostly associated with throws of the astragals (knucklebones), and this has led to suggestions they were used for games.

Figure 1 – The five types of Platonic Solids – Icosahedron is the one at the left end.ĭice can also have polyhedral or irregular shapes, with faces marked with anything from numbers to letters and even symbols, as in this twenty-sided die with faces inscribed with Greek letters from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The shape at the at the far-right end is the geometric shape used for your message-bearing die inside the Magic 8 Ball. The chart below gives a better visual of the polyhedral. What makes a polyhedron regular is that all its faces are congruent – meaning identical in shape, size and angles – and the same five number of faces meet at each vertex. A Platonic Solid is a convex regular polyhedron (made with regular solids) in a three-dimensional space. It is one of the five Platonic solids with the most faces – that is, 20 equilateral triangles with 30 edges and 12 vertices. There are an infinite number of shapes of a geometric icosahedron, but the one used inside a Magic 8 Ball is a regular symmetrical (and convex) icosahedron. Luckily enough, you won’t have to worry too much about this, since your traditional Magic 8 Ball only has one of these icosahedrons – hence an icosahedron die. The plural of an icosahedron can either be icosahedra or icosahedrons. The word icosahedron comes from the Ancient Greek (eíkosi) ‘twenty’ and from the Ancient Greek (hédra) ‘seat’ – quite literally, for its twenty sides or seats. Icosahedrons have been an old favourite polyhedron of Mathematicians and Physicists throughout the years for its sheer simplicity. The die in a traditional Magic 8 Ball is also a twenty sided polyhedral or icosahedron with statements or responses imprinted on each its regular sides.

Shape magic 8 ball