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arXiv · 2209.07698

Hitting a prime in 2.43 dice rolls (on average)

Noga Alon·Yaakov Malinovsky
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Abstract

What is the number of rolls of fair 6-sided dice until the first time the total sum of all rolls is a prime? We compute the expectation and the variance of this random variable up to an additive error of less than 10^{-4}. This is a solution to a puzzle suggested by DasGupta (2017) in the Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, where the published solution is incomplete. The proof is simple, combining a basic dynamic programming algorithm with a quick Matlab computation and basic facts about the distribution of primes.

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Noga Alon, Yaakov Malinovsky. 2023-01-23. Hitting a prime in 2.43 dice rolls (on average). https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07698

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