Baby needs a new dodgy cover of American Pie

Tuesday, September 22. 2009

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.

Posted by luckydonut in Random Thoughts at 01:45 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)
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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.

Comments (3)

#1 Geoff (Homepage) on 2009-09-22 10:50 (Reply)

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.

Comment (1)

#1.1 Chris (Homepage) on 2009-09-22 11:19 (Reply)

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.

Comments (3)

#2 Geoff (Homepage) on 2009-09-22 13:01 (Reply)

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.

Comment (1)

#3 jim (Homepage) on 2009-09-22 21:20 (Reply)

ahem.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/albums.shtml

Comments (3)

#4 Geoff (Homepage) on 2009-09-29 09:37 (Reply)

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