Intransitive dice

Authors

Abstract: We consider

n

-sided dice whose face values lie between

1

and

n

and whose faces sum to

n (n + 1) / 2

. For two dice

A

and

B

, define

A s u c c B

if it is more likely for

A

to show a higher face than

B

. Suppose

k

such dice

A_{1}, d o t s, A_{k}

are randomly selected. We conjecture that the probability of ties goes to 0 as

n

grows. We conjecture and provide some supporting evidence that---contrary to intuition---each of the

2^{k c h o o s e 2}

assignments of

s u c c

or

p r e c

to each pair is equally likely asymptotically. For a specific example, suppose we randomly select

k

dice

A_{1}, d o t s, A_{k}

and observe that

A_{1} s u c c A_{2} s u c c l d o t s s u c c A_{k}

. Then our conjecture asserts that the outcomes

A_{k} s u c c A_{1}

and

A_{1} p r e c A_{k}

both have probability approaching

1 / 2

as

n i g h t a r r o w i n f t y

.

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