roll of the dice

The Economistにインド・ヨーロッパ語の発生に関する研究結果が紹介されていました。論文自体はScienceにあるようです。去年は、Natureにて、「すべての言語はアフリカに通ずる」という内容の論文がありました。

さて、赤字で示したresorted to rolling the diceです。ここで使われるresortは、他動詞で「分類し直す」という意味です。re + sortです。さらにroll of the diceは、「サイコロの目」の意味で比喩的に「方法」という意味合いで使われているように思えます。(Othello)

（前略）
Each of the 103 languages, with its cognate sets, temporal and geographical range, constituted one leaf of the Indo-European family tree. The tricky part was filling in the branches. Here, Dr Atkinson resorted to rolling of the dice, using a method called Markov-chain Monte Carlo. This generates a random set of boughs (each assigned its own randomly generated cognate sets, time and place) that fits the known foliage. Next, an algorithm calculates how likely it is that this tree would sprout the modern leaves given the way languages evolve and travel. For instance, it is assumed that a cognate can only be gained once, by an ancestral language, but lost many times, whenever it disappears from any of the descendants. And languages, or at least their speakers, might migrate in any direction, though less readily across water or mountain ranges, say, than through plains and valleys.
（後略）