Mathemagical dice (of doom)
Sometimes some toy comes along that is simultaneously too cool and too nerdy to be allowed to exist. This time it has to be Grime Dice, which are a set of non-transitive dice.
Nerdly goodness. Image from http://www.mathsgear.co.uk
What does that mean? Well, basically there are five dice, let’s call them A to E, and if you roll A and B together, A will have a higher result than B more often than not.
Similarly B will roll higher than C, C than D, and D than E. But then E will roll higher than A most of the time. Huh?
And then, if you roll two of each die, the sequence of winning reverses. Double huh?
Apparently there’s a load of information about the maths of all this on the creator’s web site, which is linked from the shop page that I linked above, but unfortunately word has got out about this and half of the Internet wants to know more, so the poor guy’s website has exceeded its bandwidth limit and has been cut off by his ISP. Please try later.
Oh, I love this stuff. And I’ve ordered a set.
I’ve seen this idea mentioned in a recreational-maths books going back years, but owning a physical set would be neat. The odds reversing on doubles is interesting.
Check out the webgame Platonic Archetypes of Dice here:
http://ded.increpare.com/~locus/OfDice/
I’m no mathematician, so this sort of stuff is always now and impressive to me. And yeah, being a physical thing is great.