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I do a lot of furious googling thinking: "Oh man this has to be a thing but what could it be and how would someone describe it?... awe forget it."

Then months later by accident while looking at a completely different topic: "OMG there it is, the thing!"

Indeed. This happened to me the other day trying to find the name for a domino joiner while googling for biscuit joiners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name

Today I learned the true name of true name.

Another algorithm along these lines is the "shuffle bag" algorithm.

Settlers of Catan switched to this at some point--from 2 dice to a set of numbered tiles with the same distribution that you shuffle and draw from. It definitely pared some "oh man I'm so unlucky" scenarios from the game but I'm not convinced it made it more fun.