I trained a booster (LightGBM) and used it to look for nonlinearity in the items—basically I made one ICE plot per item. From this I discovered the following nonlinearities:
Unicorns were the big thing—if you submit enough Unicorn Horns, you seem to get a discount or credit on your taxes. Perhaps they are medicinal, and there is a shortage. This happens at 5 horns, and submitting more than 5 doesn’t get any further discount.
There was also some discounting going on with Cockatrice Eyes, but more confusing, where in one view of mine, it looked like the tax was bigger at 0 of them, smaller at 1, bigger at 2, smaller at 3, etc., oscillating.
Dragon, Lich, and Zombie parts looked mostly linear though.
There are a number of tax submissions for which the assessed tax was zero. Even property as large as [1 cockatrice eye, 1 lich skull, 6 zombie hands] had a zero-tax entry. So I took the strategy of starting by copying the zero-tax historical records, where I could, for three of the adventurers. For the fourth, Dragon Heads always incur a big chunk of tax, so I gave the final adventurer all the Dragon Heads, as well as 5 Unicorn Horns and an odd number of Cockatrice Eyes, to offset them.
Then from there I poked around and tried to ride the gradient downward manually. I arrived at:
From this poking around, I’ve started to feel like maybe one Unicorn Horn can cancel a Dragon Head, or something? I couldn’t get a proper black-box optimization program working, so it was just my manual optimization at the end that got me from 32.0 down to 27.0. There is probably a bit of room for progress.
I trained a booster (LightGBM) and used it to look for nonlinearity in the items—basically I made one ICE plot per item. From this I discovered the following nonlinearities:
Unicorns were the big thing—if you submit enough Unicorn Horns, you seem to get a discount or credit on your taxes. Perhaps they are medicinal, and there is a shortage. This happens at 5 horns, and submitting more than 5 doesn’t get any further discount.
There was also some discounting going on with Cockatrice Eyes, but more confusing, where in one view of mine, it looked like the tax was bigger at 0 of them, smaller at 1, bigger at 2, smaller at 3, etc., oscillating.
Dragon, Lich, and Zombie parts looked mostly linear though.
There are a number of tax submissions for which the assessed tax was zero. Even property as large as [1 cockatrice eye, 1 lich skull, 6 zombie hands] had a zero-tax entry. So I took the strategy of starting by copying the zero-tax historical records, where I could, for three of the adventurers. For the fourth, Dragon Heads always incur a big chunk of tax, so I gave the final adventurer all the Dragon Heads, as well as 5 Unicorn Horns and an odd number of Cockatrice Eyes, to offset them.
Then from there I poked around and tried to ride the gradient downward manually. I arrived at:
1: {2 Lich Skull, 8 Zombie Hand} [for 3 gp 6 sp = 3.6 tax]
2: {1 Cockatrice Eye, 1 Dragon Head, 1 Unicorn Horn} [0.0]
3: {1 Dragon Head, 1 Unicorn Horn} [4.2]
4: {3 Cockatrice Eye, 2 Dragon Head, 3 Lich Skull, 5 Unicorn Horn} [19.2]
For a total tax of 27 gp 0 sp.
From this poking around, I’ve started to feel like maybe one Unicorn Horn can cancel a Dragon Head, or something? I couldn’t get a proper black-box optimization program working, so it was just my manual optimization at the end that got me from 32.0 down to 27.0. There is probably a bit of room for progress.