Nrich has an interesting activity called “Non-transitive Dice” that I’ve always wanted to use in my probability and statistics class. I’m intrigued by the relationship between the strategy in choosing a dice and the probability of winning with that dice.
We don’t have blank dice, so I had my students make their own with cardstock.
Initially, I had them choose which dice would win overall. Then we let the rolling begin: A vs. B, B vs. C, and C vs. A. As they collected their data, they started predicting which dice would end up on top after battle.
Tomorrow, I’d like to sum up the probability representations of some of the dice match-ups. I found this nice post by James Grime (yep, the Numberphile chap) with a few varieties of non-transitive dice. Next year, I might start with his Grime set and have students collect data on different matchups.
If we are successful, hopefully we can workout the probability of these outcomes.
And finally, I know that my students will want to compare this dice game to Rock – Paper – Scissors – Lizard – Spock.
I kept digging into James Grime’s rabbit hole and realized, you can purchase this set of non-transitive dice. Skippy. I might do that!
Number Loving Beagle 
