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From: carl@aoa.UUCP (Carl Witthoft)
Newsgroups: net.games.board,net.math
Subject: Re: Dice "Odds"
Message-ID: <367@aoa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Dec-85 11:45:35 EST
Article-I.D.: aoa.367
Posted: Mon Dec 16 11:45:35 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Dec-85 04:29:45 EST
References: <309@tekigm2.UUCP> <4699@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: carl@aoa.UUCP (Carl Witthoft)
Organization: Adaptive Optics Assoc., Cambridge, Mass. USA
Lines: 22
Xref: watmath net.games.board:165 net.math:2641

In article <4699@alice.UUCP> ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) writes:
>Let's disregard the red die and color the other two green and blue.
>You will see that the green die can give any number from 1 to 6
>with equal probability and so can the blue die.  Thie means that
there are 36 equiprobable outcomes.  What are the chances of rolling,
...and so on.
There is an interesting fact he glossed over here. What happens if 
one uses two identical dice, i.e. same color and so on? In one line of
reasoning, you'd say that rolling 5,6 is indistinguishable from
rolling 6,5. This screws up the probality table. 
In fact, IT IS ONLY BY EXPERIMENT  that it has been shown that dice 
always act as though they are distinguishable. 
By way of contrast, certain photon-photon scattering experiments show
that two photons with identical energy and quantum numbers are NOT
distunguishable. This is neat stuff.


Darwin's Dad ( Carl Witthoft @ Adaptive Optics Associates)
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