The radio had been washing over me all day and I hadn’t really been paying attention until I heard the sound of dice.
Radio 1 DJ Greg James was doing a puntastic feature called "Dice Another Day" where he was going to throw the bones to determine which Madonna song to play from a list of 12 possibilities.
Two dice make just about the worst random number generator you could come up with to pick a number between 1 and 12 and I have to admit I was shouting at the radio for quite a while about how wrong this was, while also inwardly cheering for him to roll Vogue the hard way.
What can I say? It gets lonely working from home sometimes, and it’s quite likely that I’ve played too much craps. If that’s actually possible.
At least he realised part of the problem eventually, at 0:59 in this clip: "I’m guessing it’s not going to be number 1".
Something I’m sure Madonna was delighted to hear a Radio 1 DJ say about her new album.
But, in context, good guess, imo.
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The _worst_?
I don’t think you really mean that, now do you. 🙂
Of course we don’t get to see the list beforehand, which makes rooting for _anything_ a bit pointless.
Any RNG that has a 0% chance of picking any one number is pretty bad… never mind the strong bias towards middle numbers.
But I suppose the worst RNG would be a parrot.
“Polly, pick two numbers between one and twelve”.
“One and Twelve”.
Ithankyou.
Well the _worst_ random number generator for picking a number between one and twelve would be
int between1And12 () {
return rand(11)+13;
}
(I guess “11” here can be anything you like)
Apart from non-functioning ones, of course, but then they’re not RNGs.
I would not like to judge what the worse random number generator for 1 to 12 would be but two dice is prettry bad not just for the lack of possibility of 1 but also the variation in probability for the other values. That said simple maths is not a Readio one priority. I’m more of a Readio man myself.
ahem.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/albums.shtml