[simonh]

>You're clearly not much closer to getting a single random number without a random way of picking one of them.

That’s a characteristic of the original formulation of the question, not specifically in my solution. It’s implicit in the article that you can choose an arbitrary person in the room without bias.

[hanoz]

It's a shortcoming specifically introduced by your proposal. If you've got a random way of picking one of ten people, then you've already got a random number between one and ten. Your answer essentially reduces to: ask one person to think of a number then add an actual random number and mod 10.

[simonh]

From the article:

>The easy thing to do is to ask someone “Hey, pick a random number from 1 to 10!”. The person replies “7!”. Great! Now you have a number. However, you start to wonder, is the number uniformly random?

So the problem reduces to transforming one form of randomness (picking a person) to another form (a uniform numeric distribution. That's implicit in the whole rest of the article.

>If you've got a random way of picking one of ten people, then you've already got a random number between one and ten.

You've got a source of randomness, but you still need to turn that into a number. The article gives one method and I've given another. You could also assign the people numbers from a stack of shuffled numbered tiles, then pick a person although that requires you have the tiles which is not really part of the setup. The conceit is that you have to use people's ability to pick numbers pseudo-randomly. There are probably numerous ways.