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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Because the question isn’t can you make a rice with 5! Sides but can you make it so 5 players can roll simultaneously individual dice with a minimal number of sides per dice and never tie and always be fair.

Sure you can fly a helicopter to the top of Everest, but it’s not the same as climbing Everest even if the outcome is the same.

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From the article: "During a dinner conversation at a gaming convention in 2012, Eric Harshbarger was asked by a board game designer if he could come up with dice that would determine who goes first — without the possibility of a tie. The idea was simple: settle the first turn quickly and get on with the game."

The original challenge was to design dice (I assume a single die would satisfy the requirement since the number of dice wasn't the point) that would quickly determine which of five players would go first. Nothing about the challenge required that there be five dice. A five-sided die would certainly be the simplest way, and would be marginally faster than having five players each roll a separate die and then compare the numbers.

The provenance doesn’t matter because they settled on a difficult mathematical problem to solve because it was difficult to solve and would require clever solutions that answered more fundamental mathematical questions than the banal problem of choosing who goes first in a game. That was just the framing that motivated the larger math question, in which the number of dice does matter, because it’s a more interesting question.

How do you decide who gets to roll the single die?

Gee, you need a way to rank the players to decide.

> Gee, you need a way to rank the players to decide.

Do you also need to randomize a neural net before training it to play Tic-tac-toe? https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan

I wanted to say "You actually can't fly a helicopter to the top of Everest, the air is too thin", but apparently it's been done exactly twice. Stripped down specially chopper and ideal weather conditions.

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