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Baby needs a new dodgy cover of American Pie

The radio had been washing over me all day and I hadn’t really been paying attention until I heard the sound of dice.

Radio 1 DJ Greg James was doing a puntastic feature called "Dice Another Day" where he was going to throw the bones to determine which Madonna song to play from a list of 12 possibilities.

Two dice make just about the worst random number generator you could come up with to pick a number between 1 and 12 and I have to admit I was shouting at the radio for quite a while about how wrong this was, while also inwardly cheering for him to roll Vogue the hard way.

What can I say?  It gets lonely working from home sometimes, and it’s quite likely that I’ve played too much craps.  If that’s actually possible.

At least he realised part of the problem eventually, at 0:59 in this clip: "I’m guessing it’s not going to be number 1".

Something I’m sure Madonna was delighted to hear a Radio 1 DJ say about her new album.

But, in context, good guess, imo.

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5 comments to Baby needs a new dodgy cover of American Pie

  • The _worst_?

    I don’t think you really mean that, now do you. 🙂

    Of course we don’t get to see the list beforehand, which makes rooting for _anything_ a bit pointless.

  • Any RNG that has a 0% chance of picking any one number is pretty bad… never mind the strong bias towards middle numbers.

    But I suppose the worst RNG would be a parrot.

    “Polly, pick two numbers between one and twelve”.

    “One and Twelve”.

    Ithankyou.

  • Well the _worst_ random number generator for picking a number between one and twelve would be

    int between1And12 () {
    return rand(11)+13;
    }

    (I guess “11” here can be anything you like)

    Apart from non-functioning ones, of course, but then they’re not RNGs.

  • jim

    I would not like to judge what the worse random number generator for 1 to 12 would be but two dice is prettry bad not just for the lack of possibility of 1 but also the variation in probability for the other values. That said simple maths is not a Readio one priority. I’m more of a Readio man myself.

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