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madibo3156today at 3:05 AM3 repliesview on HN

It's not stated plainly in the article what the problem is, so here:

Each participant rolls a die. For there to be no possibility of a tie, no die can share a face number with another die—every face across all dice must be unique. For it to be fair, the distribution of numbers across all faces must be such that no die has an advantage over another die—the odds of rolling the highest number must be exactly the same for each die. The problem is in finding the combination of faces across five dice that satisfies these constraints. One difficulty of this is that each added player changes the whole equation—the odds get recalculated and new faces must be chosen. The secondary goal is to minimize the number of faces on the die.


Replies

yuyetoday at 5:03 AM

Thank you, I didn't really understand what they were talking about.

Personally, I feel there is an easier approach: Take a regular 12-sided die, assign numbers modulo N (N being the amount of players). Now you assign the first turn fairly for 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12 players. Add a d20 and that covers 5 or 10 players, too.

JackFrtoday at 3:57 AM

Article was really poor in stating this clearlly, to the extent it made no sense to me. Thank you.

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jeremysalwentoday at 5:03 AM

The key part is that they have to be fair when any subset of the dice is rolled together, not just when all five are rolled. Also if the dice are allowed to be different sizes then it's easier as well.

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