All the distributions look pretty much as I expected except the merpeople; while I suspected multiple peaks and/or a long tail I didn’t expect that the lower-damage visible(ish) peak had the long tail.
One thing you didn’t discuss though, is how you generated the number of trips and trip directions. One thing I noticed, but didn’t remark on, is that the variation in total number of trips each month is smaller than the variation in northbound trips and southbound trips separately. That seems unexpected given the scenario, but my main theory is that you simply had some formula for the total trips per month and then randomly assigned each trip a direction?
Your theory is correct. I had some sort of clever justification for why that made sense in-universe but I forget what it was; the Doylist reason was that I wanted the red herring in this puzzle to be as simple as possible.
The original generation code is up here if you want to take a look.
All the distributions look pretty much as I expected except the merpeople; while I suspected multiple peaks and/or a long tail I didn’t expect that the lower-damage visible(ish) peak had the long tail.
One thing you didn’t discuss though, is how you generated the number of trips and trip directions. One thing I noticed, but didn’t remark on, is that the variation in total number of trips each month is smaller than the variation in northbound trips and southbound trips separately. That seems unexpected given the scenario, but my main theory is that you simply had some formula for the total trips per month and then randomly assigned each trip a direction?
Your theory is correct. I had some sort of clever justification for why that made sense in-universe but I forget what it was; the Doylist reason was that I wanted the red herring in this puzzle to be as simple as possible.
The original generation code is up here if you want to take a look.