Exercise 3.2 - Repeated Rolling of Dice

We are trying to discover what number of repeated throws of a pair of dice is large enough that the results are close to the theoretical prediction, i.e. the predicted result from the probabilities. Here you will choose some number of times to repeat the rolls of a pair of dice. The simulation will then present the distribution of results and compare to the theoretical prediction. Each time you press the Submit Query button a new simulation will be performed.

Choose the number of times to roll the dice:

When through with this exercise you should answer the following questions:

  1. What does "close to the theoretical prediction" mean? Devise a reasonable quantitative measure. Note that there is no single right answer to this question.
  2. Apply your answer to Question 1 for each number of repeated rolls a sufficient number of times for you to draw conclusions. What number of repeated rolls of the dice usually matches your definition of "close to the theoretical prediction"?
  3. Does this number of repeated rolls always give results close to the theoretical prediction?

This document and the Perl code to generate the simulation were written by David M. Harrison, January 2001.
This is $Revision: 1.4 $, $Date: 2001/05/31 14:48:13 $ (year/month/day) UTC.