21–30 of 74 posts
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.
> This is of course hilariously cursed. It will look almost perfect, but very rarely give numbers outside the expected range. If the D65538 is fair, it is usable: you just discard the two unwanted values when they show up and roll again. Those faces could be labelled as "roll again". If you have a uniform source of random numbers from 1 to N, you can get a uniform distribution from 1 to M < N simply by discarding val…
Probably says something about me that my immediate reaction to the number 65536 wasn’t 2^16, but rather the frequency of the timer crystal you had to swap into a Radio Shack tone dialer to make a “red box”[1] that would let you make free phone calls on US pay phones by simulating the analog coin code sound of a quarter being deposited. Fun fact that the “red box” was the first hackaday article[2] posted way back in 2…
> This is of course hilariously cursed. It will look almost perfect, but very rarely give numbers outside the expected range. If the D65538 is fair, it is usable: you just discard the two unwanted values when they show up and roll again. Those faces could be labelled as "roll again". If you have a uniform source of random numbers from 1 to N, you can get a uniform distribution from 1 to M < N simply by discarding val…
This process has an infinitely small (but non-zero) chance of never terminating.
> This is of course hilariously cursed. It will look almost perfect, but very rarely give numbers outside the expected range. If the D65538 is fair, it is usable: you just discard the two unwanted values when they show up and roll again. Those faces could be labelled as "roll again". If you have a uniform source of random numbers from 1 to N, you can get a uniform distribution from 1 to M < N simply by discarding val…
This process has an infinitely small (but non-zero) chance of never terminating.
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/mathematical-challenge-of-desi...
> This is of course hilariously cursed. It will look almost perfect, but very rarely give numbers outside the expected range. If the D65538 is fair, it is usable: you just discard the two unwanted values when they show up and roll again. Those faces could be labelled as "roll again". If you have a uniform source of random numbers from 1 to N, you can get a uniform distribution from 1 to M < N simply by discarding val…
This process has an infinitely small (but non-zero) chance of never terminating.
> This is of course hilariously cursed. It will look almost perfect, but very rarely give numbers outside the expected range. If the D65538 is fair, it is usable: you just discard the two unwanted values when they show up and roll again. Those faces could be labelled as "roll again". If you have a uniform source of random numbers from 1 to N, you can get a uniform distribution from 1 to M < N simply by discarding val…
> This is of course hilariously cursed. It will look almost perfect, but very rarely give numbers outside the expected range. If the D65538 is fair, it is usable: you just discard the two unwanted values when they show up and roll again. Those faces could be labelled as "roll again". If you have a uniform source of random numbers from 1 to N, you can get a uniform distribution from 1 to M < N simply by discarding val…
This process has an infinitely small (but non-zero) chance of never terminating.
(The usual definition of that space via “cylinder sets” may seem contrived, but it’s usually introduced first because it’s “elementary” in that it does not require developing the machinery of limits of [not in] probability spaces. Those can be made to work, though, and then you can say that the space of infinite strings is the limit of the spaces of length-n strings for n → ∞ and obtain the same thing. In fact, the cylinder-set definition is essentially the limit definition with the notion of limit inlined.)
Probably says something about me that my immediate reaction to the number 65536 wasn’t 2^16, but rather the frequency of the timer crystal you had to swap into a Radio Shack tone dialer to make a “red box”[1] that would let you make free phone calls on US pay phones by simulating the analog coin code sound of a quarter being deposited. Fun fact that the “red box” was the first hackaday article[2] posted way back in 2…
You could build a red box, pink box, blue box, and others by modifying a standard tone dialer. The easiest thing to do was to add a fourth column of keys, which supposedly gave you the ability to use the ABCD digits required for military networks. I never tried that, though.
For those of you who missed out on that era, a tone dialer was a little palm-sized box that had a small Touch Tone keypad on one side, and a speaker on the other. If you had a rotary phone, after dialing, you could hold it up to the mouthpiece and use many of the fancy features that came with the invention of Touch Tone, like using FŌN cards, or listening to your messages on your answering machine.