Formally Modeling Dreidel, the Sequel | Hacker News Reader

Formally Modeling Dreidel, the Sequel

buttondown.com

100 pointstodsacerdoti26 comments

I used to think this too, but I changed my mind when a few years ago my sister wanted to play and I told her why it was a bad game because it's just based on luck, but I played anyway. She ended up getting something like 20 gimmels in a row and I got like 20 peys in a row, even after switching dreidels multiple times, and even switching where I was sitting, it was honestly one of the strangest moments of my life, it was as if god was completely rigging it against me. I think the lesson was that dreidel isn't about luck, it's about mazal.

Yep, my s.o. wanted to play skip-bo, which is also a game so simple that it's just luck of the draw, and I lost 7 games straight after lamenting the randomness of it before we even started, which isn't as impressive of a streak as 20 but still, I understand that feeling.

> also a game so simple that it's just luck of the draw

See also: Candyland.

My mother confessed she would cheat (or optimize!) the Candyland card deck so you wouldn't get sent back to the start near the end of the game... Wise woman!

4.0^(20+20) = 1.2e24

Assuming that, over history, a billion Jews have lived and spun a dreidel a trillion times, it's safe to reject the null hypothesis of this being random and accept the alternate hypothesis that G-d exists and He wanted you to lose.

This sounds like a Talmudic story about the dangers of hubris

Odd, as an Israeli Jew I’ve never heard of this game.

Fun fact for our fellow gentiles, the letter on the dreidel are different in Israel vs the rest of the world. In the US for example:

נ - נס - miracle

ג - גדול - great

ה - היה - was

ש - שם - there

In Israel the final letter is replaced with:

פ - פה - here

Meaning that the miracle has happened in Israel.

Dreidel history:

  In England and Ireland there is a game called totum or teetotum that is especially popular at Christmastime. In English, this game is first mentioned as “totum” ca. 1500-1520. [snip]

  Our Eastern European game of dreidel (including the letters nun, gimmel, hey, shin) is directly based on the German equivalent of the totum game: N = Nichts = nothing; G = Ganz = all; H = Halb = half; and S = Stell ein = put in.

  When Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, the dreidel was called, among other names, a sevivon, which is the one that caught on. Thus the dreidel game represents an irony of Jewish history. In order to celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah, which celebrates our victory over cultural assimilation, we play the dreidel game, which is an excellent example of cultural assimilation!

From "A Different Light: The Hanukkah Book of Celebration" - see https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-origin-of-the-d... (use reader view)

And some images of the top used to play:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dreidel&iax=images&ia=images

I've been playing dreidel for 40+ years. I've never played a game to completion. But that's not really the point of the game. The point is it's a way to distribute chocolate while teaching a little bit about probability and game theory.

We usually boxed it to about 10 minutes max. So everyone mostly got the same amount of chocolate, and some people did a little better than others. And then you went to mom and dad for a "bailout" because it wasn't fair that your little brother got more than you.

> If you don't have a dreidel, you can instead use a four-sided die, but for the authentic experience you should wait eight seconds before looking at your roll.

This made me literally laugh out loud. There is no better way to describe waiting for the dreidel.

Mathematically proving why a Jewish game is bad, is the most Jewish game there is!

Counterpoint: a game that's mostly about passing time and good conversation is the most Jewish game there is.

Two gentiles bump into each other on the street.

The first says: How was the party last night?

The other replies: Great!

Lol

Not as boring when the chocolate coins become shots of schnapps.

Thanks for the sequel! Looking forward to next year's article when you get around to writing PRISM as a compiler target.

Oh, dreidel as a drinking game sounds both horrific and hilarious. Here’s how I thought of it:

Everyone starts with infinite gelt — or at least a liver — and ante/paying into the pot is either taking a drink or paying a drink token. The four actions are then:

- Nothing

- Acquire a newly created token

- Everybody else: drink, or exile a token

- You: drink, or exile a token

Don’t need to run PRISM to figure how quickly that devolves.

Is dreidel typically played to completion?

I always kinda assumed that play would stop at a point where the chocolate coins were unevenly distributed but all players were still in the game, because it seems unsatisfying to give chocolate to a child and then take it all away.

Or perhaps players would eat chocolates as they played, which serves the dual purpose of making sure that everyone enjoys some chocolate and hastening the end of the game, with the victor earning all the leftover chocolate as a prize for later.

Yes, exactly, this is the reason the game (a random walk) takes forever to "end", because the kids try to get more than their share, lose some in the process, then try to get back what they had and realize they're satisfied with what they had initially, then stop playing. All the kids are happy, no kids are crying. It's not Poker where one person ends up cleaning everyone else out, that's not the point. It's to teach the dictum that "Poverty is a wheel that revolves in the world."

Maybe the creators purposefully designed the game to take forever and keep the kids occupied, so the parents could spend time debating Talmud without interruption.

> Dreidel is a bad game.

Mathematically proven now. A gut feel I've had since childhood.

But then again, spinning the thing is sufficiently fun, who needs the antes.

I actually had the exact opposite conclusion from the analysis: Dreidel is a great kids' game of chance, because it's easy to come back from a few bad rolls and it's almost impossible to lose.

It also seems to be a great game for randomly redistributing chocolate coins among children while giving them something to do that's not "run around screaming" for a while. The game went on all day long? Great, that kept them out of your hair and amused them.

The only bad thing about it is that it takes longer as players are knocked out. Now you have one kid who’s in a bad mood because they were knocked out early, and their friends are busy.

Related: some fascinating history about the origin of the dreidel.

Stephen Winick. (2022, December 13). The Truth Behind the Hanukkah Dreidel: Metafolklore, Play, and Spin | Folklife Today. The Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2022/12/the-truth-behind-the-...

I'd like to see this kind of analysis applied towards a practical question resembling:

"If I let kids=4 play each starting with chocolates=10 for minutes=30 before terminating the game, what kinds of outcomes should I expect and will any of them involve a loser throwing a tantrum?"

Yeah, the game kind of drags if you do just 1 piece in the pot per player when empty. Usually when I play it with my family we do at least 2 pieces, and also work out extra gimmicks like loans with interest to players down on their luck (very Jewish I know). Still not the most thrilling of games, but fun to play every year.

with interest?! Oy vey, not very Jewish at all!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com