All About Circuits

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jgessling

Joined Jul 31, 2009
82
When I took my youngest daughter to her dorm at UCLA we went into the office to check in. There was a picture on the wall of Lew Alcindor high above the rim about to slam one home. She had no idea who it was but maybe she learned later. According to her calculations the campus area was about %75 given over to sports facilities. She did get a good education and never went to single football game. But did appear in a couple student films.
 
cmartinez

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,782
1616533822256.png​

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210318-the-ancient-invention-that-ignited-game-play

No one knows where and when the custom of numbering the opposing sides of a cubic die so that each opposing pair adds up to seven comes from. Irving Finkel, a philologist and expert on Mesopotamian language and culture at the British Museum, suggests people might have thought this made dice "fair" though there is no scientific reason why it would. Whatever the logic, the tradition has stuck, and almost all examples of six-sided dice throughout history have opposing faces adding up to seven.
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Delta Prime

Delta Prime

Joined Nov 15, 2019
1,311
cmartinez said:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210318-the-ancient-invention-that-ignited-game-play
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I didn't like when he said.

" this made dice Fair though there is no scientific reason why it would."
Those are fighting words!
So here's a kind scientific rebuttal.
Sceintficly it is to provide a randomly determined integer from one to six, each of those values being equally likely to militate against concerns that the faces of dice cause a small bias. For a single roll of a fair s-sided die, the probability of rolling each value is exactly 1/s-an of a discrete uniform distribution. Ta-da!! :cool:
 
Alec_t

Alec_t

Joined Sep 17, 2013
15,121
"this made dice 'fair though there is no scientific reason why it would. "
A possibly unfair arrangement would be if the 4, 5 and 6 were on faces adjacent the same corner of the dice and the weight of the paint dots (or the absence of weight of indented dots) were significant enough to introduce bias.
 
cmartinez

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,782
Alec_t said:
"this made dice 'fair though there is no scientific reason why it would. "
A possibly unfair arrangement would be if the 4, 5 and 6 were on faces adjacent the same corner of the dice and the weight of the paint dots (or the absence of weight of indented dots) were significant enough to introduce bias.
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Exactly. My opinion is that, as long as dice are perfectly balanced and symmetrical and their center of gravity lies exactly at their geometric center, the way the numbers are arranged on their faces is inconsequential for statistical purposes.
 
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