Saturday, February 17, 2018

Falling Distributions

In a previous post I suggested some ways to generate falling distributions with dice. I was looking for a technique where all numbers between 1 and n have nonzero probability and where the probability of k is greater than the probability of k + 1. The ideal solution in my mind would use a single cast of the dice and wouldn't require consulting a table.
Such a solution exists. It's so simple so I'm sad I didn't see it right away. Just roll several dice and take the lowest.  As a bonus you can decrease the expected value by using more dice.