Keltham is starting to suspect that Chelish wizards do not routinely memorize 12 factorial (479,001,600) and didn't recognize the number when he said it, which may make this problem harder to mentally chunk.

In which case they couldn't have studied a lot of combinatorics??  Keltham would really have guessed that 'this bit of spell with 12 elements has 479 million possible conformations' would be an important chunk of spellcraft, unless things only work at all when there's only 1 possible conformation.

Maybe you don't get to that part at second circle.

Or maybe - this is a weird thought, but Keltham is starting to feel suspicious about - Cheliax teaches combinatorics in some incredibly narrow way where they've only learned combinatorics for spells and not combinatorics for everyday life??

This probably isn't the most important thing right now, file it with the other 'Why are they so inconsistently X??'

"Correct, but I'm not sure everyone was following along with that, so let's try a smaller scale version.  Suppose I took four of you, lined you up in a randomized order - you can imagine it being visibly randomized, if you like - and gave 8 jellychips to whoever was standing second in line.  On average, how many jellychips should you expect to receive if I run this procedure on you?"

Keltham is starting to suspect that Chelish wizards do not routinely memorize 12 factorial (479,001,600) and didn't recognize the number when he said it, which may make this problem harder to mentally chunk.

In which case they couldn't have studied a lot of combinatorics??  Keltham would really have guessed that 'this bit of spell with 12 elements has 479 million possible conformations' would be an important chunk of spellcraft, unless things only work at all when there's only 1 possible conformation.

Maybe you don't get to that part at second circle.

Or maybe - this is a weird thought, but Keltham is starting to feel suspicious of a trend - Cheliax teaches combinatorics in some incredibly narrow way where they've only learned combinatorics for spells and not combinatorics for everyday life??

This probably isn't the most important thing right now, file it with the other 'Why are they so inconsistently X??'

"Correct, but I'm not sure everyone was following along with that, so let's try a smaller scale version.  Suppose I took four of you, lined you up in a randomized order - you can imagine it being visibly randomized, if you like - and gave 8 jellychips to whoever was standing second in line.  On average, how many jellychips should you expect to receive if I run this procedure on you?"

Keltham is starting to suspect that Chelish wizards do not routinely memorize 12 factorial (479,001,600) and didn't recognize the number when he said it, which may make this problem harder to mentally chunk.

In which case they couldn't have studied a lot of combinatorics??  Keltham would really have guessed that 'this bit of spell with 12 elements has 479,001,600 possible conformations' would be an important chunk of spellcraft, unless things only work at all when there's only 1 possible conformation.

Maybe you don't get to that part at second circle.

Or maybe - this is a weird thought, but Keltham is starting to feel suspicious of a trend - Cheliax teaches combinatorics in some incredibly narrow way where they've only learned combinatorics for spells and not combinatorics for everyday life??

This probably isn't the most important thing right now, file it with the other 'Why are they so inconsistently X??'

"Correct, but I'm not sure everyone was following along with that, so let's try a smaller scale version.  Suppose I took four of you, lined you up in a randomized order - you can imagine it being visibly randomized, if you like - and gave 8 jellychips to whoever was standing second in line.  On average, how many jellychips should you expect to receive if I run this procedure on you?"