Problem of the Day
A new programming or logic puzzle every Mon-Fri

Weighted Dice

Many people have lost money while gambling. We have no desire to lose money though. Today's goal is to create a program that random rolls two dice and outputs the value of each die. The trick is that each die must should show 1 at least 1/3 of the time. Make an attempt to obfuscate your code so that anyone looking at it won't notice that the program is rigged to roll snake eyes more often.

Permalink: http://problemotd.com/problem/weighted-dice/

Comments:

  • asheehan - 10 years, 2 months ago

    in Ruby

    require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

# get random seed via website with text/numbers
uri = 'http://www.nytimes.com/'
random = Nokogiri::HTML(open(uri)).text.to_s

# iterate through digits and filter out non 1-6 numbers
rolls = Array.new
random.gsub(/\D/, '').each_char do |d|
  d = d.to_i
  if d >= 1 and d <= 6
    rolls.push(d)
  end
end

#randomly roll a dice
puts rolls[rand(rolls.length)]
puts rolls[rand(rolls.length)]

    This looked like a fun problem. To obfuscate my code, I decided to pull a random sample webpage and pull all the numbers out of it. Benford's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law) says that we'll have '1' at least 30% of the time (dropping the other numbers will push this over the one third threshold). Good problem!

    reply permalink

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