English

Intransitive dice tournament is not quasirandom

Probability 2024-11-08 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

We settle a version of the conjecture about intransitive dice posed by Conrey, Gabbard, Grant, Liu and Morrison in 2016 and Polymath in 2017. We consider generalized dice with nn faces and we say that a die AA beats BB if a random face of AA is more likely to show a higher number than a random face of BB. We study random dice with faces drawn iid from the uniform distribution on [0,1][0,1] and conditioned on the sum of the faces equal to n/2n/2. Considering the "beats" relation for three such random dice, Polymath showed that each of eight possible tournaments between them is asymptotically equally likely. In particular, three dice form an intransitive cycle with probability converging to 1/41/4. In this paper we prove that for four random dice not all tournaments are equally likely and the probability of a transitive tournament is strictly higher than 3/83/8.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.10067,
  title  = {Intransitive dice tournament is not quasirandom},
  author = {Elisabetta Cornacchia and Jan Hązła},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.10067},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:22:52.981Z