English

Generalized Intransitive Dice: Mimicking an Arbitrary Tournament

Dynamical Systems 2019-04-30 v2

Abstract

A generalized NN-sided die is a random variable DD on a sample space of NN equally likely outcomes taking values in the set of positive integers. We say of independent NN sided dice Di,DjD_i, D_j that DiD_i beats DjD_j, written DiDjD_i \to D_j, if Prob(Di>Dj)>12Prob(D_i > D_j) > \frac{1}{2} . Examples are known of intransitive 66-sided dice, i.e. D1D2D3D_1 \to D_2 \to D_3 but D3D1D_3 \to D_1. A tournament of size nn is a choice of direction iji \to j for each edge of the complete graph on nn vertices. We show that if RR is tournament on the set {1,,n}\{ 1, \dots, n \}, then for sufficiently large NN there exist sets of independent NN-sided dice {D1,,Dn}\{ D_1, \dots, D_n \} such that DiDjD_i \to D_j if and only if iji \to j in RR.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.09477,
  title  = {Generalized Intransitive Dice: Mimicking an Arbitrary Tournament},
  author = {Ethan Akin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.09477},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:23:35.667Z