On most numbered dice, opposite sides are complementary; on a cube, for example, they add to 7. As a result, if you have the skill to throw a die so that the {1,2,3} corner lands on the table, the upward face must be at least 4.<\/p>\n
I would prefer to design dice so that, if numbers are considered as masses, the center of mass coincides with the geometric center. I think this is equivalent to saying: the sum of the numbers in any hemisphere must be equal.<\/p>\n
You can’t do that with a tetrahedron, cube, D10 or regular dodecahedron; but I found three solutions for the octahedron, and 876 for the rhombic<\/em> dodecahedron. (At least I see no obvious way to reduce that number further with symmetries.)<\/p>\n For a cube the best you can do is put pairs of adjacent numbers on opposite faces. I’ll update here if I come up with an approach to the icosahedron problem that won’t take thousands of years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On most numbered dice, opposite sides are complementary; on a cube, for example, they add to 7. As a result, if you have the skill to throw a die so that the {1,2,3} corner lands on the table, the upward … Continue reading
\nThe twelve best arrangements on the regular dodecahedron all have 0 and 11 opposite each other, 1\u20135 around 11, and 6\u201310 around 0.
\nThe two best arrangements for D10 are 0285364179 and 0582367149 (reading around the fivefold axis, alternating upper and lower faces).
\n(Add 1 to each number if you don’t like zero-based indexing; it doesn’t affect the math.)<\/p>\n