Yonge

Karma: 159

Yonge 4 Apr 2026 16:14 UTC
1 point
0
on: D&D.Sci Release Day: Topple the Tower Analysis & Ruleset
Thank you for posting this. I found it easier than most D and D scenarios, complexity 2, quality 3 (Assuming you are only trying to get a good answer, trying to unravel the algorithm behind it feels more like complexity 5).

Yonge 12 Mar 2026 0:52 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci Release Day: Topple the Tower!
There is clearly some randomness in what happens, however peering throught the fog a few things stand out:
Campsites look like empty levels that don’t have much effect.
Gaining access to treasures looks crucial for having a good chance of defeating the boss, and you normally want at least 2.
Everyone always gets past level 2. The only cases of heros being stopped at level 3 are Mages by Jar Worms. For warriors/rogues cultists and Jaw Worms seem to be equivelant but Jaw Worms are Mage eaters.
Only Mages and Rogues get stopped at level 4. All rogues are stopped by slavers. these may be specialist Rogue killers like the Jaw Worms are Mage killers.
The first warrios to be stopped are at level 5 which are all stopped by sentries. Specialist warrior killers.
I put together an algo to estimate the chances of beating the boss which took account of the treasures that had been picked up and the chances of being stopped before reachingit which suggested the following:
Simple Tower: Send a Rogue along the following path: START ->Tome of Knowledge ->Jaw Worm ->Jaw Worm-> Dagger of Poison ->Cloak of Protection ->Chosen ->Shelled Parasite ->The Collector (Estimated win rate 90 percent)
Advanced Tower: Send a warrior along the following path: START ->Gremlin ->Jaw Worm ->Adamant Armor-> Enchanted Shield ->Sentries->CAMPFIRE ->Vanishing Powder ->The Champion (Estimated win rate 94 percent)
A number of other possibilities seem to be very close to these, so I am not that confident that they are optimal.

Yonge 30 Nov 2025 20:08 UTC
3 points
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on: D&D.Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast
There is clearly some randomness to the results. Some individual foods clearly seem to go down better than other (A looks like it has the biggest individual effect). There are also seem to be a number of correlations between different foods, though I couldn’t find a general pattern or disentagle it completly. Feasts with five or 6 dishes seems to go down best.
Based on what I was able to find ABFOP looks best to me, but I won’t be surprised if better feasts are available.

Yonge 23 Sep 2025 16:55 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci: Serial Healers [Evaluation & Ruleset]
Thank you for posting this. I agree with the advertised ratings. I particularly liked that some were a lot easier to catch than others, and you could gradually make progrees.

Yonge 20 Sep 2025 20:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yonge’s comment on: D&D.Sci: Serial Healers
Nettie Silver is always in the city.
Either one of Azeru or Cayn are always in the city.
Either Archiwise the Bald or Boltholopew are always in the city

When the above are excluded the only pair of mages where at least one is present in the city when Bumblepox and Scramblepox are cured are Azure and Danny Nova are always in the city. So accuse them of those.

When Chucklepox or Gurglepox are cure there are two different pairs where at least one was in the city. Danny Nova and Dankon Ground look the most likely culprits for Gurglepox. Lomerius Xardus and Danny Nova look like the most likely pair for Chucklepox.

Yonge 20 Sep 2025 17:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yonge’s comment on: D&D.Sci: Serial Healers
Mildly But Persistently Itchy Throat is always cured when Dankon Ground is on the opposite side of the city, so accuse him of this.

Tehami Darke is always in sector 6 when a case of Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome is healed in sectors 1,2, and 12. He is always in the city when a case of this is healed. This is enough to provisionally assign all the other cases to him.

Both Boltholopew and Moon Finder are always in an adjacent sector when Problems Disorder, Parachondria, and Disease Syndrome are healed. There appears to be no obvious way to discriminate between them. Maybe they are collaborating to make it more difficult for the authorities to discover them? Under the principle of innocent unless proven guilty I can’t accuse either of them of it though. If I was trying to maximise thr profit I made I would accuse both of them as it seems more likely that both of them would be involved than neither of them.

Yonge 18 Sep 2025 22:19 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci: Serial Healers
Only about ³⁄₄ of healings had a mage present in the sector at the time, so either we have cases of mages healing in sectors other than the one where they are in, or there is some other source of healing.

A mage is only reliably present when Babblepox, Scraped Elbow, Scraped Knee, and Smokesickness is cured.
Nettie Silver was always in the sector where Smokesickness was cured, so accuse her of this.
Zancro was always in the sector where Scraped Knee and scraped elbow was cured so accuse him of these.
Danny Nova was always in the sector where babblepox is healed so accuse her of this.,

There are a couple of instances where a mage is always present when a disease is cured in a specific sector. This is always sector 4, 5, or 6. It is probably not a coincidence that there is a special building in each of these sectors. Most of them only occurred a small number of times though, so they might be a statistical fluke. The two exceptions are chucklepox in sector 5 and Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome in sector 6. Tehami Darke is always in sector 6 when a case of Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome is healed in that sector, so accuse him of that. I can’t see anything obvious for sector 5 though.

Yonge 28 May 2025 18:04 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci: The Choosing Ones [Answerkey and Ruleset]
Thank you for posting this. I found it more difficult than most to untangle the rules behind what was going on, but easier than most to find a candidate that I could be reasonably confident would do a lot better than random selection (Which then turned out to be the best). Possibly having more candidates to choose from, with a smaller difference between the top candidates, would have made ML more effective relative to pure analysis.

I would prefer it if the next one came a week later as I am expecing to be very busy that week.

Yonge 24 May 2025 17:32 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci: The Choosing Ones
I am going for number 11, mainly because other adventurers with predictions similar to 11 did unusually well.

Yonge 29 Apr 2025 18:41 UTC
2 points
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on: D&D.Sci Tax Day: Adventurers and Assessments Evaluation & Ruleset
Thank you for posting this. Getting a very good or pefect answer felt a lot easier than most, however getting from a very good answer to a perfect answer seemed more difficult than most. I identified a very good answer very quickly just by looking for combinations that were present in the dataset. It was then rather frustrating to make a lot of progress in untangling the rules and still being unable to find a better solution than the first one I found. Overalll I would rate it as difficulty = ²⁄₅ playability ²⁄₅ where 3 is an average D and D puzzle.

Yonge 26 Apr 2025 22:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yonge’s comment on: D&D.Sci Tax Day: Adventurers and Assessments
!> I was able to generalise the formula to a wide range of scenrios involving heades, but the eyes are more complicated. Aside from forceing the tax to 0 when it would otherwise be relatively small I didn’t find a consistent pattern. As I can’t find anything obviously better I will stick with my original entry.

Yonge 23 Apr 2025 8:22 UTC
5 points
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on: D&D.Sci Tax Day: Adventurers and Assessments
The tax is always the same for the same set of monster parts so no randomness is involved.

I then looked for entries where only one type of part was present. With the exception of the heads this gave some obvious formulas:
When only eyes are present no tax is paid
When only heads are present tax is 2.8 for 1, 8.4 for 2 21 for 3 and 29.4 for 4.
When only skulls are present tax is the number of skulls
When only hands are present the tax is 0.2 times the number of hands.
When only horns are present and their number is < 5 the tax is 1.4*number of horns, and 1.75*number of horns when >= 5 are present.

Next I looked for records where only two types of parts were present, but with the following the exceptions it didn’t give anything obvious:
When only skulls and hands are present the tax rate is #SKULL + 0.2*#HAND
When only horns and hands are present the tax rate is:
1.4*#HORN + 0.4*#HAND provided the total tax bill is less than 6
else when horns < 5 and the total tax is < 18: 2.1*#HORN + 0.6*#HAND
else when horns < 5: 2.8*#HORN + 0.8*#HAND
When horns >= 5 : 1.75*#HORN + 0.5*#HAND

After much looking at the data a lot I was then able to find the following formulas when skulls, horns, and hands were all present:
1.4*#HORN + 0.4*#HAND + 2*#SKULL provided the result is < 6
Else 1.75*HORN + 0.5*HAND + 2.5*SKULL provided there are at least 5 horns
Else 2.1*#HORN + 0.6*#HAND + 3*SKULL provided the result is less than 18
Else 2.8*#HORN + 0.8*#HAND + 4*SKULL provided ther result is less than 40
Else 3.5*#HORN + 1*#HAND + 5*#SKULL

Eyes and particularly heads seem to introduce a lot of extra complexity.

The best record I could find with 4 eyes and 4 heads had 4 eyes, 4 heads and 1 hand, so I tried to give these to 1 adventurer, and then allocate the rest amonst the remaining 3 according to these formulas. However the result was worse than the best I could find by looking up the tax for various combinations in the datafile. I will therefor use this as my entry if I can’t work out what is going on with the eyes/heads.
Adventurer 1: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(5)HORN(6)HAND(2)TAX: 23
Adventurer2: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(0)HORN(1)HAND(0)TAX: 0
Adventurer3: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(0)HORN(0)HAND(3)TAX: 0
Adventurer4: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(0)HORN(0)HAND(3)TAX: 0
Total estimated tax is 23

Yonge 9 Jan 2025 20:01 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament Evaluation & Ruleset
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.

Yonge 5 Jan 2025 16:13 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
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

Yonge 16 Nov 2024 22:39 UTC
1 point
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on: The Foraging (Ex-)Bandit [Ruleset & Reflections]
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.

Yonge 14 Nov 2024 0:31 UTC
2 points
0
on: Inferential Game: The Foraging (Ex-)Bandit
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 cycle towards the end:
08:00 Pig Swamp
09:00 Bunny Ride
10:00 Snake Shores
11:00 Dog Valley
12:00 Dog Valley
13:00 Dog Valley
14:00 Dog Valley
15:00 Rooster Peaks
16:00 Monkey Meadow
17:00 Bunny Ridge
18:00 Pig Swamp
19:00 Pig Swamp
20:00 Tiger Forest
21:00 Tiger Forest
22:00 Tiger Forest
23:00 Tiger Forest
This got me 2761 food total.
I enjoyed this. Though I think the 10 minuite estimate is far too low. This leaves less than 1s per decision!

Yonge 29 Oct 2024 18:42 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Coliseum: Arena of Data Evaluation and Ruleset
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!

Yonge 26 Oct 2024 21:35 UTC
5 points
0
on: D&D Sci Coliseum: Arena of Data
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 of speed + 2 gauntlets
ELF KNIGHT v HUMAN KNIGHT + 3 boots of speed +1 gauntlets
DWARF WARRIOR v ELF NINJA + 3 gauntlets + 2 boots of speed
HUMAN MONK v DWARF MONK + 4 boots of speed
As for the bonus obective. It looks like someone is threatening us if we do well in one or more of the fights, however I can’t establish the details with any reliability. And as we have no idea who sent, and what their real intentions are, we would probably be wise to ignore it ad do what we would have done anyway, at least for now.

Yonge 13 Jul 2024 6:46 UTC
1 point
0
on: D&D.Sci: Whom Shall You Call?
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 correlation, the rest seem to have a weak positive correlation.
- For hostility the Mystics have a weak negative linear function, the Wraiths have a positive linear one, the rest appear to have a positive step function.
- For grotesueness the Mystic have a weak negative correlation, the destroyers have a positive linear correaltion, the rest seem to have a weak positive step function.

So one is always negative linear. One is a positive step function for everything, the other 4 are positive linear in one, but have a step function for the rest.

Fitting a model to this leaves the best results as:
A: Entity Eliminators (1737)
B: Spectre Slayers (1999)
C: Mundanifying Mystics (2862)
D: Entity Eliminators (1737)
E: Wraith Wranglers (1747)
F: Mundanifying Mystics (2842)
G: Demon Destroyers (1459)
H: Phantom Pummelers (1804)
I: Wraith Wranglers (1961)
J: Wraith Wranglers (1934)
K: Mundanifying Mystics (2842)
L: Mundanifying Mystics (2783)
M: Spectre Slayers (1857)
N: Phantom Pummelers (1778)
O: Wraith Wranglers (1747)
P: Mundanifying Mystics (2775)
Q: Wraith Wranglers (1513)
R: Mundanifying Mystics (2940)
S: Spectre Slayers (1686)
T: Mundanifying Mystics (2821)
U: Phantom Pummelers (1756)
V: Demon Destroyers (1567)
W: Demon Destroyers (1942)
Total Cost: 48089
But unfortunately we can’t have them all due to anoying guild rules.
When no slayers are present total cost is 48737
When no eliminators are present total cost is 48444
Max 3 pummeller restriction isn’t relevant yet, but destroyers are used. Re-running this when destroyers aren’t present yields the following results:
When no slayers or destroyers are present the total cost is 49934
When no eliminators or destroyers are present the total cost is 49162
So the money saved by the destroyer call out fee is worth it in both cases, and we don’t need to worry
about the pummeler restriction.
based on this model the best choice is therefore:
A: Spectre Slayers (1942)
B: Spectre Slayers (1999)
C: Mundanifying Mystics (2862)
D: Wraith Wranglers (1887)
E: Wraith Wranglers (1747)
F: Mundanifying Mystics (2842)
G: Demon Destroyers (1459)
H: Phantom Pummelers (1804)
I: Wraith Wranglers (1961)
J: Wraith Wranglers (1934)
K: Mundanifying Mystics (2842)
L: Mundanifying Mystics (2783)
M: Spectre Slayers (1857)
N: Phantom Pummelers (1778)
O: Wraith Wranglers (1747)
P: Mundanifying Mystics (2775)
Q: Wraith Wranglers (1513)
R: Mundanifying Mystics (2940)
S: Spectre Slayers (1686)
T: Mundanifying Mystics (2821)
U: Phantom Pummelers (1756)
V: Demon Destroyers (1567)
W: Demon Destroyers (1942)
Total cost is estimated to be 48444
There is still quite a bit of variation, and I don’t think all of this is random, and if I was doing this for real I would definitiely analyse the data further to svae more money. As it is lack of time means that I will go with the above for my entry.

Yonge 11 Jun 2024 22:16 UTC
3 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Alchemy: Archmage Anachronos and the Supply Chain Issues
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 most convincing (With 118 entries) is:
Crushed Onyx
Dragon Tongue
Dragons Blood
Eye of Newt
Giants Toe
Ground Bone

Sadly 3 of these ingredients aren’t available however. The same is true of most of the combinationsn that have a 100 percent success rate. There is only one exception but as that is based on a single record using that is highly risky.

The next best with a 65.5 percent chance of success based on 29 records is:
Crushed Onyx
Demon Claw
Ground Bone
Vampire Fang

So I’m going to have to recommend he uses these, and hope he doesn’t end up with Inert Glop instead.