Related papers: Hitting a prime by rolling a die with infinitely m…

Noga Alon and Yaakov Malinovsky recently studied the following game: you start at 0, and keep rolling a fair standard die, and add the outcomes until the sum happens to be prime. We generalize this in several ways, illustrating the power of…

Given a (possibly infinite) subset $A$ of the natural numbers, we ask how many times a fair six-sided die must be rolled until the rolled numbers add up to an element of $A$. Using a one-dimensional dynamic programming recursion together…

What is the number of rolls of fair 6-sided dice until the first time the total sum of all rolls is a prime? We compute the expectation and the variance of this random variable up to an additive error of less than 10^{-4}. This is a…

Let $S=(d_1,d_2,d_3, \ldots )$ be an infinite sequence of rolls of independent fair dice. For an integer $k \geq 1$, let $L_k=L_k(S)$ be the smallest $i$ so that there are $k$ integers $j \leq i$ for which $\sum_{t=1}^j d_t$ is a prime.…

We study the expected number of rolls required for the cumulative sum of a fair six-sided die to first enter a prescribed target set $H\subset\mathbb{Z}_{\ge0}$. A one-variable dynamic-programming formulation is introduced that removes…

A closed form is found for the expected number of rolls of a fair n-sided die until three consecutive increasing values are seen. The answer is rational, and the greatest common divisor of the numerator and denominator is given in terms of…

What is the average number of tosses needed before a particular sequence of heads and tails turns up? We solve the problem didactically, starting with doubles, finding that a tail, followed by a head, turns up on the average after only four…

We show how to simulate a roll of a fair $n$-sided die by one flip of a biased coin with probability $1/n$ of coming up heads, followed by $3\lfloor\log_2 n \rfloor+1$ flips of a fair coin.

Suppose we have $n$ dice, each with $s$ faces (assume $s\geq n$). On the first turn, roll all of them, and remove from play those that rolled an $n$. Roll all of the remaining dice. In general, if at a certain turn you are left with $k$…

Dickson conjectured that a set of polynomials will take on infinitely many simultaneous prime values. Later others, such as Hardy and Littlewood, gave estimates for the number of these primes. In this article we look at this conjecture,…

This paper looks into the gain or loss from rolling a fair die multiple times and choosing the highest or lowest number as the outcome over rolling the die just once. Specifically, this paper gives a general formula for the expected value…

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 $n$ faces and we say that a die $A$ beats $B$ if a random face…

Many large arithmetic computations rely on tables of all primes less than $n$. For example, the fastest algorithms for computing $n!$ takes time $O(M(n\log n) + P(n))$, where $M(n)$ is the time to multiply two $n$-bit numbers, and $P(n)$ is…

We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…

We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…

A cube is used as a fair die of 6 faces. However, there are many dice of different shapes on the market. To make them fair, most of them usually have some symmetric shapes. We here classify these variants of dice on the market into two…

We investigate the expected number of calls required to achieve Bingo in a generalized (n,m)-Bingo game, where each n x n card is filled by sampling n numbers from m possible values per column. Using the inclusion-exclusion principle, we…

Monier and Rabin proved that an odd composite can pass the Strong Probable Prime Test for at most $\frac 14$ of the possible bases. In this paper, a probable prime test is developed using quadratic polynomials and the Frobenius…

In this paper it was shown that all prime numbers lie on 96 half-lines. At the same time, it was shown that if a given number does not lie on any of the above half-lines, then it is a composite number. A corresponding linear mathematical…

If the product of two monic polynomials with real nonnegative coefficients has all coefficients equal to 0 or 1, does it follow that all the coefficients of the two factors are also equal to 0 or 1? Here is an equivalent formulation of this…