0.00023814967230605090687395214144185337601

Yesterday my younger son was playing dice; the game involved throwing 6 dices simultaneously, and he threw a complete set 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, twice in a row!

Is that a millenial-style coincidence worth cosmic pronouncements? Actually, not that much: since the dices are indistinguishable, the probability of a single throw of this type is

\frac{6!}{6^6}\simeq  0.015432098765432098765432098765432098765,

so about one and a half percent. And for two, assuming independence, we get a probability

\frac{(6!)^2}{6^{12}}\simeq 0.00023814967230605090687395214144185337601,

or a bit more than one chance in five throusand. This is small, but not extraordinarily so.

(The dices are thrown from a cup, so the independence assumption is quite reliable here.)

Published by

Kowalski

I am a professor of mathematics at ETH Zürich since 2008.