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The cursed d65536

aleph.se

1–10 of 74 posts

Re: The cursed d65536

#2
I know it's not the point of TFA, but you can just roll a d8 6 times, generating 3 bits each time, for a total of 18 bits, and then discard two of them.

Re: The cursed d65536

#3
post #2

I know it's not the point of TFA, but you can just roll a d8 6 times, generating 3 bits each time, for a total of 18 bits, and then discard two of them.

Yep, or use 16 dice that have only 0 and 1 on them. The order would be important, so you'd want to color them or otherwise indicate which was high order and which was low.

Re: The cursed d65536

#4
post #3
post #2

I know it's not the point of TFA, but you can just roll a d8 6 times, generating 3 bits each time, for a total of 18 bits, and then discard two of them.

Yep, or use 16 dice that have only 0 and 1 on them. The order would be important, so you'd want to color them or otherwise indicate which was high order and which was low.

Or do 16 throws of such a d(2) die, i.e. 16 coin flips, in succession.

If you really want to do it in one throw, you don't really need to color them all differently, though. Just read them in a specified way, i.e. always from left to right and top to bottom. (You don't even have to always read them the same way as long as how you read them is completely independent from what their faces show.)

Re: The cursed d65536

#5
From the broken first attempt: Each face has 3 vertices, shared between 6 faces, so the total number of vertices is 65536, and they become faces of my die.

This should have tipped you off. If you have six triangular faces around every vertex, you have a flat Euclidean plane, not a sphere with positive curvature.

For another example of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jfSTwqmrQDc

Re: The cursed d65536

#6
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, or use 16 dice that have only 0 and 1 on them. The order would be important, so you'd want to color them or otherwise indicate which was high order and which was low.

Or do 16 throws of such a d(2) die, i.e. 16 coin flips, in succession. If you really want to do it in one throw, you don't really need to color them all differently, though. Just read them in a specified way, i.e. always from left to right and top to bottom. (You don't even have to always read them the same way as long as how you read them is completely independent from what their faces show.)

Kids these days. What ever happened to sacrificing a goat and reading the entrails?

Re: The cursed d65536

#8
> XKCD joked about the problem of secure generation of random 32 bit numbers by rolling a 65536-sided die

Well, 2^16 = 65536, so it's a 16-bit number. To get a random 32-bit number you'd need to roll more than once....

Re: The cursed d65536

#9
post #2

I know it's not the point of TFA, but you can just roll a d8 6 times, generating 3 bits each time, for a total of 18 bits, and then discard two of them.

You can buy hexadecimal dice ie D16 with the sides labelled 0 through F, I have some, I use them to generate random numbers when it is important to me that I personally have confidence these are random numbers.

With hex dice you can generate 16 bits with four rolls, four bits each time.

Obviously you're more likely to already have a D6 somewhere, but then you're even more likely to own a coin, and 16 coin tosses is also an effective way to generate a 16-bit number.

Re: The cursed d65536

#10
post #7
post #2

I know it's not the point of TFA, but you can just roll a d8 6 times, generating 3 bits each time, for a total of 18 bits, and then discard two of them.

Why not just roll 4D16? https://www.amazon.com/Lanema-Polyhedral-Dungeons-Dragons-Si...

"... for Dungeons and Dragons" ah yes, I use a D16 all the time when playing D&D /s
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