Snake Sneak
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Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.
Snake Sneak
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Ziggurat Zagger
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onomastikon wrote:I have been told that the average number of Amnesia scrolls one finds in a 3-rune game are 14. Since I am now in my fifth game in a row with 4 runes, in each game of which I have found less than 4 scrolls, I feel perplexed. I do not wish to doubt the power of RNJesus, nor do I wish to whine, I would like to know, however, the source of the data that has been given. What, exactly, has been averaged, by whom? Or is this from the source code? Thanks in advance
Slime Squisher
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onomastikon wrote:I have been told that the average number of Amnesia scrolls one finds in a 3-rune game are 14.
Snake Sneak
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Snake Sneak
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Tomb Titivator
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Ziggurat Zagger
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delarado wrote:14 sounds high to me.
I don't have a whole load of wins under my belt, but when I do win, I'd say I get an average of about 3 or 4 amnesia scrolls.
Slime Squisher
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Ziggurat Zagger
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Sorcerous wrote:This being said, why are we making this into a thread laden with observer bias? Even if the distribution has a (possibly large) mean area and we've all experienced the outliers at some point, why discuss those when the code for item generation is readily available? What I'm saying here is that we should find and take some of the relevant DCSS code for item generation, and then see where the noise comes from: if the scrolls of amnesia/ remove curse/ blink/ whatever else "feels" sparse compared to the expected mean result - what is generated instead that makes the numbers strange? There has to be a higher number of something else that compensates (and obscures) the numbers we can reasonably expect to see. There is something in the same item "bracket" as the amnesia scrolls in this case, and that makes us say "not enough" for one and keeps us from noticing more of the other(s).
Slime Squisher
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Siegurt wrote:So some more numbers beyond the mean which might help here:
The average amnesia scrolls across all levels in 1000, 3 rune games is around 14.6
The minimum was 4, the maximum was 27
The average/min/max scrolls generated in the *dungeon* branch was: 3.69/0/11
The average/min/max scrolls generated in the *lair* branch was: 1.36/0/7
The average/min/max scrolls generated in the *orc* branch was: 0.36/0/5
The average/min/max scrolls generated in the *vault* branch was: 1.91/0/8
The average/min/max scrolls generated in the *vault* branch was: 1.51/0/8
Some things you can see here: the average is consistently closer to the low end than the high end, meaning we don't have a evenly-distributed bell curve, we have a high-ish number of games with a low number of scrolls generated, with a long tail (a graph of distrbutions would be fatter on the low end than the high end) therefore it's very likely that if you look at the number of *games* (rather than the number of *scrolls*) you'll see a large number of games with scrolls generated in the lower range of numbers, and comparitively fewer games with numbers on the high end of the average.
This is probably why "mean number of scrolls" isn't the the most intuitive quantifier, what you really want is "median number of scrolls per game" (assuming a fairly continuous distribution, which I believe this is) That number isn't reported by the statistics gathered, but would probably be more in tune with what one would intuitively expect.
Snake Sneak
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Ziggurat Zagger
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onomastikon wrote:Hence my original question regarding the source of the data (if the generation for the data was taken from a source which is not identical to the source which generates items in the application I am using).
I am not good at math, but from the very little I understand, the way that numbers are generated randomly might make the "average" (not the median) different for different circumstances.
onomastikon wrote:For example, it seems (and this is obviously observer bias, thus "seems") that many games tend to generate similar items; when I find a potion of degeneration, I frequently find many more in levels near, and less other things. That makes me wonder if item generation is somehow type-related.
Currently, I am playing a game and am in Lair:6 and have not found a single ring, of any type, anywhere. (There was only 1 shop and it was not of jewelry). Checking my autopickup, it confirms that I have never seen a ring. I know this is an outlier. It feels odd (whatever "feels" means) to experience DCSS as having "more" "outliers" than other loot-based games of this nature. Hence my original question, and the question regarding the type and quality of the RNG.
Snake Sneak
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Blades Runner
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The "better" the RNG generator, the less predictable the random numbers generated are, but even the worst of them wouldn't generate clusters of results like you seem to allude to.
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