[ExI] nanogeezers again

[BillK]

On 22 March 2017 at 13:28, Mike Dougherty  wrote:
> That battery for size comparison makes me think a box about the size of a
> baseball might be ideal.  I know sports memorabilia stores have clear keeper
> boxes for baseball (and softball size?)  However, now you're introducing a
> new parameter to this puzzle:  the ratio of volume of nanogeezer to
> container.  That wasn't a concern in the original unbounded "space" problem.
>
> Imagine a crude surrogate for the nanogeezer: an ordinary cubic die.  The
> probability of a fair toss landing with any particular surface face up is
> 1/6.  Once you put the die inside an acrylic cube of sufficiently small
> proportion that the cube has no axis of freedom to turn, you've grossly
> affected that probability.  There is an ideal volume at which it is exactly
> possible for the vertices of the die to touch the midplane of each face of
> the container.  There is a technical opportunity for that freedom to
> manifest an actual change in orientation, but the constraint is such that
> there is only the smallest likelihood that random shaking of the container
> would ever orient the cubes in the magic moment.
>
> So now we're talking about the ideal ratio of cubic (or otherwise?)
> container to nanogeezer of any particular dimension... and material... and
> ???
>
> I think i've lost scope of what it was we were looking for in the first
> place.  I'm having a good time free thinking on it, but I'm not sure where
> the goal is anymore.
>

Wouldn't a clear spherical container be more random? Like the lottery machines,

BillK