Little math problems October 2019

[jpcuzzourt]

(10-06-2019 07:07 PM)pier4r Wrote:  ...
Back to the game of Ur. In the teaser there where practically 4 dice, each behaves like a coin.

Nowadays we normally use dice with 6 sides, flipping coins is unpractical and only **cough** nerds **cough** have other type of dice or even calculators (and who on earth would download apps to simulate dice!).

Thus you scavenged some of your popular games (risiko, monopoly, settlers of catan, cluedo and what not) and you found an handful (you decide how many) of 6 sided dice, how you are going to simulate the "flipping of 4 coins"? Please explain it to your fellow players. Of course the solution should be practical.

Well, I'll jump in with a couple of naive suggestions. First, I should say I may not be adequately prepared since I haven't watched the Finkel video yet, so these may be too naive.

1. Use 4 dice, and count certain rolls as [heads], and others as [tails].
e.g. 1,2,3 = [heads], 4,5,6 =[tails], or
even=[heads], odd=[tails]

2. Use a single die and roll it 4 successive times with rules as above to determine
[heads] or [tails]

I'm curious as to what I must be missing, as this seems like a trivial problem, so I'll go watch the video now, because I always enjoy Finkel.