All of Yonge's Comments + Replies

Yonge*10

Thank you for posting this. I rate this as about 3/5 for both complexity and quality. It was relatively easy to make some progress, but getting a perfect answer that you know is perfect looks hard. I think adding more rooms to the dungeon would have made things more difficult as it would have added more combinations to consider.

Yonge10

I only had time to construct a simple model based on the average value of the score for different encounters in different dungeons. Based on this my submission is:

COG/GOB/WHD

And when Goblins aren't present:

CON/WOB/NHD

Yonge10

I was expecting earlier choices of foraging location to have a much stronger impact, and mistook some of the randomness for affects of earlier choices. In retrospect it would have been better to spend longer exploreing various possibilites rather than settling on an exploit strategy so soon. Adding an explicit target was a big improvement as it gave some idea of "how good a strategy" we should be searching for.

Yonge20

I starte off by going to each one in turn. And then visiting those sites that yielded the best results. It rapidly became clear that some sites were better at different times of the day, and visiting one site too much could result in diminishing returns. Then I spent an entire day at each site in turn and then visited the sites that produce the most food at a given time. The relative order of visiting sites did have an affect so this didn't always work particularly well. After a bit of playing around and experimentation I ended up settling on the following

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Yonge30

Thank you for posting this. Overall I would rate this as a middle of the road (ie good) scenario. Complexity 3/5, quality 3/5.

I thought the bonus objective was in principal a good addition, though it could have done with an extra couple of known words. As it is unless you spot the anomaly with Cadagals boots it seems next to impossible to figure out what it might mean.

Overall I think a gap of about 2 months is better than short gaps of one month followed by longer gaps of several months. Though possibly not this time as that would put it right in the middle of the Christmas period!

1SarahNibs
I think the bonus objective was a good idea in theory but not well tuned. It suffered from the classic puzzle problem of the extraction being the hard part, rather than the cool puzzle being the hard part. I think it was perfectly reasonable to expect that at some point a player would group by [level, boots] and count and notice there was something to dig into. But, having found the elf anomaly, I don't think it was reasonable to expect that a player would be able to distinguish between * do not reveal the +4 boots at all * do not use the +4 boots vs the elf ninja * give the elf ninja the +4 boots to be used in their combat * give the elf ninja the +4 boots afterwards but go ahead and use them first It's perfectly reasonable to expect that a player could generate a number of hypotheses and guess that the most likely was that they shouldn't reveal the +4 boots at all, but they would have no real way of confirming that guess; the fact that they're rewarded for guessing correctly is probably better than the alternative but is not satisfying IMO.
Yonge50

 Looking at how various combinataions of race and class do against one another when their levels are the same there are clearly some combinations that do a lot better than others. Increasing the level helps to an extent, but the race/class combination looks like it is easily the most important factor. Special items do help, but less than the level. In most cases boots seem a bit more useful than gauntlets.

Manually scanning through the data suggests that the following combinations hopefully won't be too bad:

DWARF NINJA  v HUMAN WARRIOR + 1 boots o

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Yonge10

In general there seems to be a weak correlation between each of the attributes and costs,both when you consider every exorcist and the individual group.
- For corporeality the mystics seem to have a weak negative linear correlation.  The rest look like they have a weak step function
- For sliminess the mystics seem to have a weak negative linear correlation. All except the Pummelers (Which look linear) seem to have a weak step function.
- For intellect the Mystics again appear to have a weak linear correlation. The Slayers have a linear positive correlat

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Yonge30

All potions have between 3 and 8 ingredients. Those with 6 and 7 are most liekly to succeed with 3 being particularly unlikely. In particular Barkskin Potion is never brewed successfully with only 3.
Barkskin Potion, in common with all other potions has two ingredients that must be present, in this case Crushed Onyx and Ground Bone.
 
The same set of ingredients sometimes produce different potions so there is clearly some randomness involved.
 
Scanning through the results there are several combinations that always produce the required potion. The mos

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Yonge10

Those apprenticed under Escher, Geisel, and Penrose never produce impossible structures. Those apprenticed under Johnson and Statmin always do. Self Taught architects sometimes do.

I couldn't find a reliable way of determining which Self-Taught architects would produce impossible structures, so I will have to go with four of D, E, G, H, K.

All the really cheap structures are made out of wood and dreams. Unfortunately none of the 5 architects proposals have these materials. Excluding these the next cheapest ones are all made out of 2 of wood/dreams/steel, the

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Yonge30

There is some evidence that 2 artillery is sufficient to deal with 3 tyrants, but the amount of data is a bit small. I couldn't see any other change I could make which wouldn't lead to at least some measurable risk of loseing.  Risking being eaten to impress my superiors feels like a poor trade off, especially as they should hopefully be at least somewhat impressed with winning a battle at 10:16 odds, so I will stick with my initial selection. (Though I'm pretty sure that someone who was willing to take some risk of being eaten for extra prestige would be well advised to take one fewer artillery.)

Yonge30

 The more soldiers that come, the higher the chance of victory. We however will be outnumbered by at least 6, and previous squads that were outnumbered this badly only won 58 percent of the time.
 
There is no massive difference where the presence of one weapon and alien leads to victory, or where an alien is present but a weapon absent leads to defeat.

Looking at the cases where 1 soldier fought 1 alien:
- Artillery reliably win against venomopede, tyrants, scarab (only 8 records), crawlers, abominations
- Flamethrowers reliably beat crawlers, scarab

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3Yonge
Yonge10

>!Grey turtles have a much lower weight than most 3.9->7.9
Greyish green turtles have a lower weight then the green ones, though the ranges overlap. Lowest 13 highest 42.9
There is a big spike in the number of green turtles with a weight of 20.4
Suggests we are dealing with multiple distinct species.

 
The spike in green turtles with a weight of 20.4 all have 6 shell segments. 
No green turtle with 6 shell segments has a weight other than 20.4.
Therefore Harold has a weight of 20.4

 
All gray turtles have fangs, and no other coloured turtles do

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Yonge20

Looking at this further, by far the strongest effect is the latitude, and that looks more like a rectangular effect than a trigonometric one. Replacing  the trigonometric fit with one that modelled a rectangulat latitude effect and no other yielded a model that explained most of the variation. By itself this looks better than the previous model.  

The next biggest effect looks like it is due to variation in murphys constant. This looked vaguely quadratic. 

The next biggest effect looked like it was due to variations in the value of Pi. It look

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Yonge20

Thank you for posting this. My findings are as follows:

Only 2 existing locations have > 100 performance. Both of these have:
- No strange smell
- Mint air
- Adequate Feng Shui

Most other high performers (But sub 100) have the same properties. Addittionally the weird sounds of the high performers are either:
- Eerie Silence
- Otherworldly Skittering

This suggests it would be sensible to restrict ourselve to locations with these properties. This alone increases the average performance from 23.12 to 46.92

High values of murphys constant are bad, though the affect

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2Yonge
Yonge20

 My best estimate is:

Hammer Hurler
Matchlock Marauder
Professor Pyro

This is also my entry for the PvP contest

Yonge50

I found this problem late. Could I have an extra day or two please?

4aphyer
Sure, no objections.   In the absence of further requests I'll aim to post the wrapup doc Friday the 9th: I'm fairly busy midweek and might not get around to posting things then.
Yonge21

I think this would have worked better if there had been less data. Looking at the other responses I'm not convinced that adding serval hundered thousand addittional rows did anything significant other than to extend the time needed to scan across this. This stopped me doing a more extensive analysis.

Also I found this one less interesting than the previous ones. I suspect a lot of this has to do with the introductory storyline which didn't make much sense to me. Possibly this was because I hadn't heard of the "homestuck" story before, and didn't have any relevant pre-existing context to relate this to.

Yonge10

I found this one much more difficult to get into than the other problmes in the series. Possibly irrationally I suspect this is because the back ground story was rather convoluted. I was able to load all the data, though it took about 20s to scan all over it which felt like an inconvenient delay.

 

Based on a rather cursory analysis I hope that the following two won't be too bad:

Page of Hope and Heir of Space

Yonge20

I haven't had a chance to analyse any effects that depend on Waking-Time yet. But based on the other data every other Snark that was hunted that matched  one of B/G/H/P/Q/Y was successfully hunted so if this was for real I would play it safe and go with:

B G H P Q Y

To maximise value:

A B C D G H J K L M N P Q R V W Y

Looks like it will yield an expected value of just over 14, albeit with an uncomfortably low 84 percent chance of survival. This is my provisonal entry to the bonus task if I don't get a chance to analyse Waking-Time dependant effects.

Yonge20

Thank you for posting this. I didn't think this was too straightforward. Prior to reading the solution I actually thought it was one of the more difficult ones. Possibly because I focused on trying to copy the allocation helms early choices instead of on the ratings.

Yonge30

Some traits definitely go better with some houses, however I couldn't see much in the way of clear cut rules. I constructed the following highly provisional allocation by considering students that were sorted when the helm was still reasonably reliable, and then combining the probabilities of a student with each of the 5 ratings being sorted into each house, and selecting the one which on balance seemed most likely.

A    Dragonslayer
B    Thought-Talon
C    Serpentyne
D    Dragonslayer
E    Humblescrumble
F  

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Yonge30

 After staring at the data a bit more:

  • Woodcutters are only valuable at low coal levels. At coal level 1 an extra miner is consistently more valuable than a woodsman
  • Brewers seem to be actively harmful to fort value.
  • There is a big fall in fort value when no warriors are present.
  • The previously observed drop off in the value of additional miners after 5 seem to occur because it makes it less likely for other valuable types to be present, not because it is intrinsically bad. 6 miners and 2 smiths/crafters seems to be much better than 5 miners and 3 smiths/
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2SarahNibs
Yonge20

Some more observations:

 - Having no farmers, brewers or warriors leads to 100 percent expedition failure. If there is a warrior present there is a small chance of success (Raiding for food?).
- The chances of failure when there are >= 4 farmers present and no brewers/warriors is statistically indistinguishable from about 99.5 percent regardless of the number of farmers. 3 farmers with no warriors/brewers gives a much lower success rate. Adding warriors only makes a distinguishable difference when the number of farmers is small.
 - 4 brewers and

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3Yonge
Yonge60

A few observations:

  - There is a weak correlation between expedition size and the probability of the fort surviving, so we should choose 13 dwarves.
   - Farmers and brewers are crucial to the survival of the city. Specialising in one type seems more efficient than having both. 6 farmers or 6 brewers guarantee survivial, but if you have a mixture you need at least 10. Farmers seem slightly better than brewers. 3 farmers give > 99 percent survival, but 4 brewers are needed to do as well. Warriors marginally increase survival odds when ther

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2Yonge
Yonge30

I only had time for a very superficial analysis, however hopefully the following isn't too bad:

  • Rainbow Rays of Rahl
  • Alatar's Abyssal Armor
  • Solomon's Solar Shield
Yonge50

 * When Monstrous Regeneration and Anomalous Agility is assigned to every hero it results in a 
* 36 percent win rate. When they are chosen there is only a 21 percent win rate. The sample
* size is to big for this to be dismissed as a statistical fluctuation. With the DM ruling out
* any difference in God assigned cheats or other time dependent effects it looks like heroes
* are making their decisions based on some hidden variables we don't have access to.

* Many combinations of traits assigned by the Chaos deity also show substantial differenc

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Yonge10

For heros with our traits:

- Temporal Distortion and Rapid XP gain are the best 2 overall which seem to work well with anything.  The best single combination however is Enlightenment + Radiant Splendor (94 percent win rate). Shapeshifting is just terrible and should always be avoided. The others work well with some traits, but not with others;
The following combinations are very poor (< 1/2 win rate) and should not be given to other heroes like me:
- Anomalous Agility + Barrier Conjuration
- Anomalous Agility + Monstrous Regeneration
- Anomalous Agility

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3abstractapplic
As DM, I can confirm that skills provided with the help of the Chaos Deity or Eldritch Abomination are identical to those provided by the goddess alone.
Yonge60

Thank you for posting this.

The need to join to other records was trivial for me.

I think the data model was too complex too fully decipher with a reasonable amount of effort, but this wasn't a problem as it wasn't necessary to get a decent answer (I might actually have got the optimal one if I hadn't blundered and missed that Italia suffered a famine in the previous year - though I was uncertain on a number of points and wasn't expecting to do as well as I did). In particular the wealth/population dependency completely passed me by. 

Overall in terms of difficulty it felt OK. 

Yonge30

Some omens/disasters are clearly correlated with what happens next year, though I couldn't find anything that stood out and made a given disaster nearly certain to happen this year. Some of the signs were also contradictory. I couldn't find any additional clear cut pattern by looking at previous years, though given that several disasters come in clumps I wouldn't be surprised if there was something to learn by looking for correlations > 1 year in the past.  I suspect a complicated algorithm could need to be used to pull everything together to produ

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Yonge20

There doesn't seem to be a killer card that dominates one or more of the others.

Having a balanced deck seems to be important, as the probability of winning  consistently declines as the number of distinct cards falls, and the maximum number of a single card rises.

The cards clearly aren't equivelant as some groups of cards do consistently better than others. 

I haven't been able to get a grip on what the rules might be, but peering through the fog suggests that the following combination won't be too bad:

 2 Alessin, Adamant Angel
 0 Bold Ba

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Yonge20

Oops. It should be:

 

Infiltrate:
3273
4449
4027

Legal:
5058
3850
2325

Paramilitary
3440
2719
3597

Yonge50

Infiltrate:
3273 
4449 
4027 

Legal:
5058 
3850 
2325 

Paramilitary
3440 
2719 
4027

4aphyer
It looks like this plan sends two teams (one Infiltration and one Paramilitary) after the same SCP.
Yonge60

Min noise in 9 max is 32, with an average of 16.
Everyone with > 28 noise had a Trum-Troopa. All the really low instances of noise which involved Trum-Troops were wither with a boy paired with a Fum-Foozler or a girl pared with a Who-Whonker.

Girls tend to make much more noise with Fum-Foozler than boys.

There seems to be a slight bias to younger children producing less noise with Sloo-Slonker.

If a child likes/dislikes a Gah-Ginka one year it looks like it will also like/dislike it another year.

Blum-Blooper appears to be consistently unpopular with Fum-Foo

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Yonge20

My final advice is as follows:

 

 As there are only half points for duplicates focusing on one area is not a good idea. As hunts in locations where the Crow That Breaks The Sky are present it seems like a good idea to avoid Thunderwood Forest (excpet in Weeks 6). There's no information on how many points you get for different sized creatures which makes it difficult to factor that in. The number of datapoints for hunts in this period is very low so I will just crudely weight the hunts to the areas that look more promising.
 
Week 06: Thunderwood

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Yonge40

The known Genus in the monster file appear to be grouped. Together with hints about data being obscured by poor handwriting it suggests the unknown ones belong to the group they are in:
Toxicala = Beast
Earthmover = Beast
Raging Windrider = Avian
Flying Storm = Drake

Within a genus the data is consistent with being ordered by size  suggesting:
Rimewinder <= Scary
Dull Viper >= Rinewinder, <= Scary
Peaksnake  >= Dull Viper, <= Scary
Wrathrope >= Peaksnake, <= Scary
Earthmover >= medium, <= legendary
Macrophant >= Earthmover, <

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2Yonge
My final advice is as follows:  
Yonge30

Thank you for posting this. Overall I felt the level of complexity was about right for an average DandD problem. I was able to extract some useful information with a moderate amount of effort, but  reading through the ruleset I doubt anyone could figure out the perfect team from the dataset without a lot of luck.

Yonge70

 

 

 There is mo obvious correlation between no encounters and probability of success, but it looks like this is caused by better teams of adventurers taking on dungeons with more encounters on average.
 

There are no teams where more than 2 adventurers are of the same class. There is probably a reason for this.
Where there are duplicate types the dungeon is only beaten 55 percent of the time v 64 percent when there are no duplicates, so I will have 4 different types of adventurers in all my teams.
 

There is no obvious correlation betwee

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Yonge80

Spoiler protection.

 

Team colour doesn't appear to have any meaningful imapct on the chances of winning.

There are onl2 games where the opponents combination was played which is too small to draw any conclusions from, however there are 352 games where a team has had 4/5 of these characters. 

Teams with Greenery Giant or Nullifying Nightmare in them seem to do unusually well against Dire Druid (Nullifying nightmare does slightly better)

Greenery Giant looks very strong there is no other character that has been part of a winning team > 50% of the ti

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Yonge10

When I attempt to run the script from the command line I get the following errror:

File "c:\programfileswithnospace\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\__init__.py", line 107, in <module>
   from . import _api, cbook, docstring, rcsetup
 File "c:\programfileswithnospace\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\rcsetup.py", line 24, in <module>
   from matplotlib import _api, animation, cbook
 File "c:\programfileswithnospace\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\animation.py", line 34, in <module>
   from PIL import Image
 File ... (read more)

2lsusr
That appears to be Windows related. I don't know how to fix it properly. But the error looks like it's limited to graphing. The code might work if you disable all the matplotlib graphing and do everything via text instead.
Yonge50

This was my favourite dand sci problem so far, and I would have spent longer looking at it if it hadn't coincided with a period when I had less free time than usual.

The one niggle I had with this is that the data wasn't in the most user friendly format, and a significant fraction of the time I spent on this was used munging the data into a more useable format. Maybe a useful exercise for problems of this complexity would be for the author to attempt to solve it using just the given data, and adjust it accordingly?

Making every problem this complex feels like it would be taking things too far, but I would like the occasional one like it.

Yonge20

 Thank you for posting this.
 

My initial observations are as follows:

 

I couldn't find much just by looking at the data.
 
Roughly 90 percent of all type of ship survive their voyage.
Survival rate for different purposes varies between 84 and 92 percent doesn't seem partcularly significant
 
Looking at the survival rates for different combinations of ships and purposes revelas some anomalously low values Carrack carrying redstones only 79%. Dhow and Mythrill 71% are the standouts. Might be a statistical fluctuation, and as we don't know w

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Yonge30

 

Solar - Appears to operate on approximately a 27 day cycle which suggests it's value should be around 50 on day 384. However this has risen to anomalously high values recently (The supernova being a star may be the cause), so there is a risk it may not behave as predicted in the immediate future.
 
 Lunar - Seems to go through a pattern of relative highs and lows that repeat every 27-28 days, probably not coincentally the same as the orbital period of the moon. On day 356-357 lunar was at a relatively high value of 46 - 39, so this looks like

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Yonge10

 

Spolier protection

Where we have access to data for Maria for all resonances the amplitude that would have been produce is roughlyn in the same ballpark except for the gamma resonance which is highly variable and is  not obviously correlated to anything. The ordering is:

- delta
- alpha
- beta
- zeta ( except for a few where zeta generated 0)
- epsilon
 

- eta is a little erratic, sometimes above beta, sometimes below zeta, othertimes in between.

Which would suggest that delta should be used, except this pattern clearly doesn't hold for all the othe

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Yonge30

My first thought was that if I'm bidding against different versions of me then we should all co-operate and bid at most 1sp in order to maximise our profits. However we would most likely be up against NPC who won't do this which wrecks this strategy. In the absence of any indicateion of how the NPC and other bidders would bid I generated a random price between 0.9* average price and 0.9* minimum price, and then manually adjusted a couple that didn't  look right which resulted in the following bids:

Lot 1 Red Dragon 1 days since killed     &nb

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Yonge10

Spoiler protection.

Long term pattern of prices falling with time since killed for all monsters.
 
Yeti are consistently the cheapest. Winter Wolfs start of as the most expensive, but as time since killed 
increases the Snow Serpent becomes roughly equal.
 
Yeti have yielded the highest profit with Snow Wolf the highest losses.
 

From the description it looks like the winning bid and profit should be independent.
For each lot find similar lots in the past. From the ones Carver didn't win we can estimate the probability of winning for each possib

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Yonge30

Spoiler protection

Known harpy, kraken, merpeople, and shark attacks seem to be on a gentle rising trend.

 

 

Known pirate attacks fall substantially from 1401 onwards, but are still the most common. Despite this the year and month doesn't appear to have much impact on losses, and there is no obvious correlation between the month and the frequency of a given attack.

The direction doesn't appear to have much impact either.

Looking at how the damage is distributed across known encounters

- Harpy peaks at around 10-15 then falls away, none have done more t

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Yonge10

Thank you for organising this.

I think a week is a good length for them to last. 3 days felt a little rushed.

Yonge80

Spoiler protection

 So you foolish mortals, you don't trust me enough to give your true names,
  your worried that I might talk you out of your soul if you allow me to talk to you,
  and you feel the need to put in place precautions to stop me sending you anything other than your marching
  orders. Despite this you do apparently trust me to take an important decision for you. If everything is
  as it appears this set of mortals is even more stupid than the usual lot.
  
  Looking at the the list it start of with the necroma

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2gjm
Thank you for posting this. The larger-than-expected discrepancy between it and my own results prompted me to find a bug in my code.
Yonge10

The intel file contains two attacks by Necromancer A, but no attacks by Necromancer C. We're also told that the attacks will be simultaneous, and two mages can't be in the same place at the same time. Is this a typo?

1abstractapplic
Good catch, edited now, tyvm.
Yonge10

I came up with this:

// Plotting a graph of reading v colour reveals the following.
//- Blue somewhat erratic but definite trend of increasing mana with increasing reading
//  The erratic part is in the 22 - 63 range, before and after steady increase/decrease.
//- Green  seems to fluctuate in the 2- 40 range regardless or reading
//- red erratic all over the place, no consistent pattern
//- yellow seems to fluctuate in the 18 - 21 range regardless of reading
//
// Green has an average mana of 21, red 25 , though green seems to have fewer with really low

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