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 values.
///
/ There is no obvious correlation based on the items name.
// Eliminating obviously uneconomic items suggest the following are realistic:
//Pendant of Hope 54 mana 34 gold BLUE
//Ring of Joy 10-30 mana 32 gold BLUE
//Hammer of Capability 15-35 mana 35 gold BLUE
//Warhammer of Justice +1 18-21 mana 41 gold YELLOW
//Plough of Plenty 18-21 mana 35 gold YELLOW
//Saw of Capability +1 avg 21 mana 35 gold GREEN
//Amulet of Wounding +2 avg 21 mana 35 gold GREEN
//Pendant of Truth avg 25 mana 38 gold RED
///
/ Pendant of Hope is obviously the best. Could reach target with near 100 percent certainty with top 5 items
// leaving me with 23 gold.
///
/ Pendant of Hope + Saw of Capabilty + amulet of Wounding + Pendant of Truth would leave me with 58 gold
// if it worked, but would probably fail just under 50 percent of the time. This could be reduce significantly
// by paying 32 gold, but that would only leave me with 3 gold more, and still looks less certain.
///
/ As avoiding being in debt by 200 gold is probably much more important to me than gaining 25 gold I will go
// for what looks to be the safe option of:
// Pendant of Hope
// Ring of Joy
// Hammer of Capability
// Warhammer of Justice + 1
// Plough of Plenty
// And hopefully 23 gold.
My attempt:
My first thought is to look for the lowest stat in each category which succeeded. I will probably want at least this. Unfortunately this is 2 in every case, so this doesn’t help.
My second thought is to look for a patch in stat space where there are a disproportionably large number of successes, however of the stats I can access none has a meaningful number of adventurers particularly close to them.
My third idea is, for every possible set of stats we could choose look at the adventurers whose stats were strictly worse than or equal to those, and see which ones enclosed the highest proportion of successes. There are several with a 100 percent success rate, but none with more than 2 data points, which isn’t much. There are however 2 with 6 datapoints and an 83 percent success rate, which seems better established:
str: 8 con: 14 dex: 13 int: 20 wis: 12 cha: 5
str: 8 con: 14 dex: 13 int: 19 wis: 13 cha: 5
Both seem roughly evenly balanced, and either seems to be a reasonable choice. I would go with the first purely on the intuition that if you are going to have one really strong stat, better to go all the way.