Allen Very Serious Versfeld on Nostr: As a school kid, I always had some dice with me. Just loved them. It was handy for a ...
As a school kid, I always had some dice with me. Just loved them. It was handy for a quick bit of ttrpg, but really I just loved the dice themselves.
And one day I noticed how many games involved 2 D6s, but how seldom you ever got a 2 or a 12, while 7s came up all the time. And also? NEVER a 1. So I got thinking.
The mystery of the 1 lasted a few seconds, I'm sure. It's pretty obvious. But the rest?
So I started rolling dice behind my books in the back of the class, again and again, and drawing a little histogram of the results. Sure enough, 7 was the most common, followed by 6 and 8, and so on down to 2 and 12 being very rare. Woah! But why?!
I had a clue: There was more than one way to get the various answers: You could get 6 by rolling 1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+3 and 5+1. But there was only one combination each that gave 2 and 12.
So I drew a little grid, similar to how we used to draw out our times tables: 1 2 3 4 5 6 on the horizontal, and the same on the vertical, to map out every possible combination of ways the dice could land. And then I drew another histogram of the frequencies of the different results in that table. It was the same shape as my random trial!
Obviously I didn't have the vocabulary for what I was doing that I do now. I hadn't even heard the word "Histogram" before (we just called them bar graphs because what's the difference!). But I'm still pretty proud of teenaged me for getting so much learning out of a boring maths lesson.
And one day I noticed how many games involved 2 D6s, but how seldom you ever got a 2 or a 12, while 7s came up all the time. And also? NEVER a 1. So I got thinking.
The mystery of the 1 lasted a few seconds, I'm sure. It's pretty obvious. But the rest?
So I started rolling dice behind my books in the back of the class, again and again, and drawing a little histogram of the results. Sure enough, 7 was the most common, followed by 6 and 8, and so on down to 2 and 12 being very rare. Woah! But why?!
I had a clue: There was more than one way to get the various answers: You could get 6 by rolling 1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+3 and 5+1. But there was only one combination each that gave 2 and 12.
So I drew a little grid, similar to how we used to draw out our times tables: 1 2 3 4 5 6 on the horizontal, and the same on the vertical, to map out every possible combination of ways the dice could land. And then I drew another histogram of the frequencies of the different results in that table. It was the same shape as my random trial!
Obviously I didn't have the vocabulary for what I was doing that I do now. I hadn't even heard the word "Histogram" before (we just called them bar graphs because what's the difference!). But I'm still pretty proud of teenaged me for getting so much learning out of a boring maths lesson.