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Lottery of Doom: Difference between revisions
→Real Life: Removed the (spoilered) incorrect solution from the Josephus' Permutation example, and provided a link to the correct answer on Wikipedia instead.
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (layout tweak, italics on work names, CAPS to italics, BSG link, copyedits) |
(→Real Life: Removed the (spoilered) incorrect solution from the Josephus' Permutation example, and provided a link to the correct answer on Wikipedia instead.) |
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* The historian Josephus was among a handful of holdouts trapped and surrounded by Roman soldiers, so they cast lots to see who got to die first (they were all planning to die, but since Judaism considers suicide a sin it was up to the others to kill whoever drew the metaphorical straw first); in the end, Josephus and the other remaining survivor surrender to the Romans.
** The amazing thing is that Josephus, an obsessively image-conscious writer who did everything he could to make himself look good, apparently didn't realize how bad a light this story put him in.
** There is actually a math puzzle similar to this ([[w:Josephus problem|Josephus' Permutation]]; featured in ''[[Professor Layton]]''). A given number of people get in a circle, and starting at a specified person and for a given N, every Nth person is killed and removed from the circle until only 1 remains. The puzzle is to figure out who the survivor is.
* If someone tried to escape a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the guards would line up all the prisoners and kill every Nth one.
** Ancient Romans used "decimation" as a means of group punishment. The soldiers were divided into groups of ten, and a drawing of lots would decide which one would be killed by the other nine.
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