December 12, 2011

Entropy (Part 5): Randomness by rolling Avogadro’s dice

With Avogadro's number of dice, you can roll them as much as you want, and the chance that there is an outcome other than the one that corresponds to the position of the spike is so unlikely you can safely ignore them.
December 5, 2011

Entropy (Part 4): Randomness by rolling ten dice

For 10 dice there are over 60 million arrangements and Figure 1 shows the outcomes for 30,000 rolls.
November 14, 2011

Entropy (Part 2): Randomness by rolling three dice

it is suggested the difficulty students have in understanding that entropy is a measure of randomness can be approached by rolling dice. In the first entry two dice were rolled but in that case there are only 36 arrangements and 10 outcomes (rolls from 2 to 12). This does not show that the most random state dominates (i.e. the one with most number of arrangements consistent with a roll of 7) . To show that more dice need be rolled. In this entry three dice are shown to have more randomness in the outcomes (3 to 18).

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