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BGonline.org Forums
An Open Letter to SHG Players
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: An Open Letter to SHG Players (W Womack)
Date: Tuesday, 20 October 2009, at 2:54 a.m.
Obviously you are in the right here, and the people who are whining about the new dice are idiots. If you posted here just to solicit reassurance, then be reassured. I'd also add that you should just ignore the idiotic accusations about your integrity and competence. Trying to respond to them by finding bona fide statisticians to back you up is like throwing pearls before swine. They won't listen to you no matter what experts you marshal behind you. Besides, as you eloquently put it, for something as simple as this, no degree in statistics is needed.
Moving beyond the obvious, however, there is an interesting question as to what SHG should do now, and whether we can/should help them. One possibility occurs to me: Perhaps SHG could create an option where two players could, by mutual agreement, opt to use the old dice generator (assuming it is still around and hasn't been deleted). The new dice could be called "standard dice" and the old dice could be called "classical dice" or something, with of course an explanation available to those who want to know the difference.
By the way, I seem to recall that when machine shuffling of cards was introduced into bridge, the expert players noticed that they seemed to be getting "freakish" deals more often. The explanation was apparently that human shuffling is sufficiently non-random that an expert player can sense the difference between human shuffling and "truly random" shuffling over the course of enough games.
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