5 ms·
If curved sides are considered sides, wouldn't a symmetric object made from three curved lenticular faces be a more reasonable choice?
by skykooler 4y ago
If curved sides are considered sides, wouldn't a symmetric object made from three curved lenticular faces be a more reasonable choice?
- jerf 4y agoFor the purposes of building a fair random number generator, obviously so. Especially if you include having everyone using the device also understand and agree that it is fair. However, the question here is simply directly the question "How thick does a coin have to be to equal chances of landing on its side or either face?", in which case changing the design to something else is simply to answer a different question. At best you might try to extract something useful from the alternate formulation to bring back to your original question, but in this case I wouldn't see any value; we already know that we can construct n-sided symmetric objects from curved faces for n >= 1 (if you consider a sphere a 1 sided die) and it doesn't help the original question much.
- partdavid 4y agoYou know, I've always disliked d4s and the special way you have to "roll" them for a fair result. Too much technique. A successful roll you can see and even make rules about, as in craps (must hit the back edge of the rolling surface to be fair). I've never had luck finding what I want (which is just a d8 with two surfaces marked with each number 1-4). I feel the same about some weird d3 shape too, because it doesn't really roll and would require a similar "toss" that's hard to judge. I'd rather have double-marked d6s, which do seem to be available.
- madcaptenor 4y agoSo what do you do in practice? Just use a d8 and reduce mod 4?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- partdavid 4y agoOh no, in practice I just do the usual thing and feel vaguely dissatisfied. It just doesn't rise to the level of resisting peer pressure.