OT: Home Sick for the Holidays, or Probability and Yahtzee

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
IIRC, the odds for multiple dice with separate outcomes for each are calculated by multiplying the individual odds; i.e., the odds for rolling a Yahtzee (all 5 d6 on same number) in a single roll would be 1/6^5, or 1/7776. However, it's been quite some time since I've studied probability, so I don't remember if that's correct.

Wouldn't it be 6/7776, or 1/1296, since there are six mutually exclusive ways to score a Yahtzee (five ones, five twos, five threes, etc.)?

If you want, you could always write a program to run through all the permutations and check whether they match any of the scoring combos... I've written two Yahtzee programs myself so I could always borrow something from one of those and just run all the permutations through a loop instead of generating them randomly...