Zoom Maths Club - Of Dice and Gen(eration) of Random Numbers - Dr Sam Tickle

30th January 2021
During the last twelve months, I must guiltily own up to joining in the trend of playing a ridiculous quantity of board games, usually involving random chance in the form of dice. These objects of random number generation have been with us for a very long time, with the standard cube-shaped die - sometimes referred to as a d6* - the most ubiquitous in both modern and ancient games. This is all very well if you want to fairly generate a random number from the set of integers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, but what about from the set {1, 2, ..., k}, for some arbitrary positive integer k? We'll explore this problem and talk about machine-generated random numbers, and their fundamental importance in applications as varied as engineering, weather forecasting and pandemic control.

*If you have a d6 to hand, bringing one along will be useful, but not essential, as virtual dice will also be provided.