tl;dr:
Blue Pendant of Hope, Blue Hammer of Capability, Yellow Plough of Plenty, Yellow Warhammer of Justice +1, gaining 124+ mana for 145gp.
Do not gamble with green items or the red pendant of truth; the value of a good, lucrative client with a somewhat useful sensing device and your own credibility is worth much more than some gold pieces today.
okay, lemme read:
Regularities found:
blue items register +/- 1 on the thaugister, except jewelry gets a +22
weapon mana is at least 10x the bonus and no more than 10(x+1) the bonus
(axes and hammers are tools, not weapons)
yellow items yield 18-21 mana
green items are capped at 40 mana and their thauyard readings seem very uncorrelated
actually all jewelry gets a +22 to its thaudout
jewelry-adjusted blue-adjusted thaulues are at most 60
red mana is always some product of 2s, 3s, and 5s
green items always yield an even amount of mana
non-blue items have thauras whose only prime factors are 2, 3, 5, or 7
green items yield mana whose prime factorization’s non-2 exponents sum to at most 2, and only if exactly 1 from bases greater than 5
some identical red and green items have wildly different mana/thauata
Name | Glow | Thauxy | Price | Mana |
Longsword of Wounding +2 | Red | 14 | 66gp | 20, 24 |
Warhammer of Justice +1 | Yellow | 5 | 41gp | 18-21 |
Hammer of Capability | Blue | 35 | 35gp | 34, 36 |
Pendant of Truth | Red | 40 | 38gp | 2^a x 3^b x 5^c |
Ring of Joy +5 | Blue | 29 | 32gp | 6, 8 |
Warhammer of Flame +2 | Yellow | 48 | 65gp | 18-21 |
Battleaxe of Glory | Blue | 7 | 23gp | 6, 8 |
Plough of Plenty | Yellow | 12 | 35gp | 18-21 |
Saw of Capability +1 | Green | 16 | 35gp | 2 x A |
Amulet of Wounding +2 | Green | 50 | 35gp | 2 x B |
Pendant of Hope | Blue | 77 | 34gp | 54, 56 |
Pendant of Joy +4 | Green | 42 | 39gp | 2 x C |
200gp, 120m? We can get that with Blue Pendant of Hope, Blue Hammer of Capability, Yellow Plough of Plenty, Yellow Warhammer of Justice +1, gaining 124+ mana for 145gp. Definitely take the job, and try to figure out on the road what’s up with the Red Pendant of Truth and all the Green items. A good Green item saves ~30gp, but if we can know the Red Pendant of Truth is great we could save even more.
Crucially, no probabilistic choices should be made, for three reasons:
You have no guarantee about the distribution of item stats presented. They are very likely not uniform random. In fact meta-you suspects that there was once a list of 1000 items and 164 got filtered out.
You have a good client who is handing you 55gp for a day’s work. This is an excellent situation. It is far better to keep this client than to try to eke out additional gold for this particular job.
Further, you have valuable information. You know what the client’s thaudget does with jewelry and items with a blue glow, and you know how weapon mana and bonuses are related, and you know the yield of items with a yellow glow, and you know the maximum yield of items with a green glow. You can use this information in future deals with the client, or, if you can arrange a more profitable deal for the information itself, perhaps land a major score. But this second possibility is far, far less likely if you accidentally damage your credibility by supplying less than 120 mana.
I enjoyed this! I performed really poorly!
So after an enjoyable evening of coding up some heuristics and then having very little clue of how to combine and then translate them into probabilities, I realized that my only chance to win was to hope that the data set was in some ways easy, meaning that most participants would get almost everything “right”, and the winner might be determined by who was overconfident enough.
Don’t get me wrong, my heuristics didn’t perform all that well, but I do wonder how much of the “overconfidence” we see is a result of actual miscalibration versus strategic. If you think your discrimination is working really well, you probably want to gamble that it’s working better than everyone else’s, but if you think it’s not working so well, it does seem like the only chance you have of winning is overconfidence plus luck.