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Comment by pfedak

You're saying you knew the thing you wrote for n=3 specifically was wrong and just wanted someone else to confirm? I don't know man, I'm not really buying it. I think you did the classic dismissive nerd thing[1] and hedged it like this for plausible deniability.

I don't get the gotcha you're trying to do. Yes, the simple pattern you posted can be extended, but it has very little to do with the problem. If you had suggested [1,2,3] [4,5,6] [7,8,9] worked I would still have made my comment; I think the fact that you found a pattern that could be extended easily should have itself been a counter-indicator. Compare with something like the Fano plane[2].

I would want you to take away from this that posting the thing you came up with in "20 seconds" isn't as neutral a contribution to conversation as you thought. Things are often complicated and worth engaging with. It would have been cool if you kept going far enough to see there's a nice argument that it's actually impossible to solve it with n-sided dice for n people if n>2.

[1] https://xkcd.com/793/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_design

parent pfedak 1 month ago

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