Set of 5 non-trasitive dice shows some remarkable properties (video) | Hacker News Reader

Set of 5 non-trasitive dice shows some remarkable properties (video)

mathsgear.co.uk

90 pointsColinWright16 comments

If you want to know how they work, here is the website. http://singingbanana.com/dice/article.htm

It is currently down for me. However wikipedia does a great work explaining it as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice

Reminds me of Simon Tatham's Catan dice: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/dice/

Stephen Lavelle's Platonic Archetypes of Dice is a Pokemon-style Flash game based on this Rock-Paper-Scissors-like quality of differently distributed dice.

http://www.increpare.com/2009/11/platonic-archetypes-of-dice...

what happens if five people play at once, each with a different color?

No one wins on average?

Anyone know of a hackable program that will simulate dice rolls that allows for arbitrary sides?

I'm working on a set of dice for rolling passwords, and wanted to simulate it in software - while this is trivial to do if it's already been done I'd like to avoid the effort.

In python you would use random.choice and fill it with your desired faces, e.g. for one of the dice in the awesome video: random.choice([3,3,3,3,3,6])

Try R:

   > s <- sample(c(3,3,3,3,3,4), size=100, replace=T)
   [...] output elided
   > table(s)
     3  4
    86 14

In order: this samples size times from a vector created by c with 5 3s and one 4 (you could also say c(rep(3,5), 4) with replacement and assigns the sample to a vector called s. table(s) produces counts of unique values.

I recognized these guys from somewhere - and then I remembered that they are the same people that lecture on the Youtube channel Numberphile.

Great channel! Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/numberphile

Why is it important to call the green die 'olive'? Both 'olive' and 'green' have 5 characters... I suppose it's because you can spell out MR. BOY with the dice in winning order if you use olive :)

If you watch the video further, James explains that there is in fact a second 'chain' of victory, which is memorised using the colours in alphabetical order.

Ah, totally missed that when I watched the first time. Thanks!

There is a second dominance order using the alphabetical order of the names. The second order does not reverse when using double dice.

Does some way exist to get these in the USA?

I just ordered them shipped to Canada, so I'm guessing yes.

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