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

http://www.mathsgear.co.uk/

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

90 16 14 years ago

mathsgear.co.uk

ertdfgcb2• 14 years ago

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

slmbrhrt• 14 years ago

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

dexy2• 14 years ago

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 :)

bodski• 14 years ago

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.

dexy2• 14 years ago

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

jws• 14 years ago

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

bediger• 14 years ago

Does some way exist to get these in the USA?

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

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

teaspoon• 14 years ago

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...

i_cannot_hack• 14 years ago

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

zdw• 14 years ago

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.

vessenes• 14 years ago

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])

earl• 14 years ago

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.

TwoBit• 14 years ago

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

ertdfgcb2• 14 years ago

No one wins on average?

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

Related Stories