PROBLEM 261

My office neighbor, Dr. B., often assigns eight homework problems per day and wants to select one of them to grade.  With as few rolls as possible, how can he use one standard six-sided die to select a number uniformly between one and eight?   (A uniform selection is one for which all outcomes are equally likely.)  What could he do if he were to assign nine problems?  

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ã2007 Alberto L. Delgado