Posted by colinprince 2 days ago
(no affiliation)
I think there have been discussions about some of these sets here as well.
I’m loving the non-transitive dice. My son’s birthday is in (checks calendar) ten months, but he’s getting these dice now anyway. So cool.
If I imagine a 3-sided die, for simplicity, you should be able to have this result if the sets are [1,5,9],[2,6,7],[3,4,8]. And so on for larger numbers of players. Why doesn't this work?
You also can't generally "and so on" constrained combinatorial arrangements like this.
> You also can't generally "and so on" constrained combinatorial arrangements like this.
I know you can't generally but in the specific case I proposed you can (3 sets of 3, 4 sets of 4, 5 sets of 5, each dice taking one ordinal of each set).
You might want to check that your proposed generalization criticism applies to the generalization at all before suggesting the arrangement doesn't work :)
I by no means was suggesting that the trivial solution I, a non-mathematician, thought up in 20 seconds was somehow out of reach to a math professor who spent years on the problem. I knew I was wrong.
I didn't see why until I actually went through the solutions by hand.
Dude runs a mean D&D campaign too. And his Lego mural and sculpture portfolio are something to behold: http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/portfolio.html
TFA claims it's "new" in 2026, but the current state of the art seems to still be that of 2022.
I bought actual dice like these in 2024 from https://mathsgear.co.uk/collections/dice/products/go-first-d...
So well, is TFA just a big pile of slop?
It is a pile of slop and I am surprised that your comment is downvoted.
I don't know why would HN crown prefer this pile of journo fluff to the article by, you know, the guy who actually made the thing.
For 2 players, the dealer rolls a standard 6-sided die, and the result determines who goes first:
1, 2, 3 => Player A
4, 5, 6 => Player B
1, 2 => Player A
3, 4 => Player B
5, 6 => Player C
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 => Player A
6, 7, 8, 9, 10 => Player B
11, 12, 13, 14, 15 => Player C
16, 17, 18, 19, 20 => Player D
1, 2, 3, 4 => Player A
5, 6, 7, 8 => Player B
9, 10, 11, 12 => Player C
13, 14, 15, 16 => Player D
17, 18, 19, 20 => Player E
This is really all you need to decide who goes first. It's perfectly fair. It uses standard dice that most people already have in their game drawer.
The article is actually about a different, much harder problem about the full playing order. You don't actually need that extra complexity to decide who goes first.