Still it seems reasonable to point out the opportunity cost of spending a couple trillion dollars on a misguided war effort. It is true that the economy would be in better shape without those expenditures, and it’s also probably true that US federal budget constraints would be different as a result. (However it may still have been spent elsewhere instead of scientific research.)
machrider
Karma: 154
100 years is nothing in the evolution of a civilization though. The time between agricultural revolution and the discovery of evolution is not a typical period in the history of humanity.
Perhaps a better word would have been ‘elegant’.
Suicide hotline operators will sometimes call the police on you...
I haven’t been able to get to any of the east bay meetups yet, so I’m excited to see this in SF. I’ll do my best to be available for it. With all the talk about the NYC group, I keep thinking “What could SF do?”
On the Human
Pursuing this stupidity to its logical conclusion, I just did an elimination match with 16 rounds. Start with all combinations and cull the weakest member every round. Here’s the result: http://pastie.org/1217255
Note the culling is sometimes arbitrary if there’s a tie for last place. By pass 14, we have a 3-way tie between blue/blue, blue/green, and green/yellow. Those may very well be the best three combinations, or close to it.
Final version of program here: http://pastie.org/1217284
(Removed randomness and just factored in the probability of evasion into damage directly. This lets me use smaller numbers and runs much faster. Verified that the results didn’t change as a result of this.)
Agreed, re: the limitations of my method. As you suggested, I ran another pass using only the top 7 candidates (wins >= 19 in my previous comment). Here are the results:
3: blue/red 5: blue/green 7: blue/blue 7: green/green 7: green/red 9: green/blue 11: green/yellowChoosing the top 10 (wins >= 17 from before):
7: blue/red 7: red/green 9: green/green 9: green/red 11: blue/blue 11: blue/green 11: blue/yellow 11: green/blue 11: yellow/yellow 13: green/yellowYellow/yellow pops up as a surprise member of the 5-way tie for second place. The green sword is less effective once you introduce these new members. There are probably a lot of surprises if you keep varying the members you allow. And all of this still assumes a normal distribution, which is unlikely.
I’m thinking iterations just confuses things. With a high enough HP value we should be able to eliminate “luck”. So here’s a pass with 1 iteration and 20 million initial HP:
2: red/blue 8: red/red 13: yellow/blue 13: yellow/red 15: red/yellow 15: yellow/green 17: blue/yellow 17: red/green 17: yellow/yellow 19: blue/red 19: green/blue 19: green/green 19: green/red 19: green/yellow 21: blue/blue 23: blue/green
Deleted earlier comment due to a bug in the code.
Here’s the result of a naive brute force program that assumes a random distribution of opponents (i.e. any combo is equally likely), sorted by number of wins:
185: red/blue 269: red/red 397: yellow/blue 407: yellow/red 438: red/yellow 464: red/green 471: yellow/green 483: yellow/yellow 512: blue/yellow 528: green/green 539: green/red 561: green/blue 567: green/yellow 578: blue/red 635: blue/green 646: blue/blueThe program is here: http://pastie.org/1217024 (pipe through sort -n)
It performs 30 iterations of all 16 vs 16 matchups. Note that the player that attacks first has an advantage, so doing all 16 vs 16 balances that out (everyone is player 1 as often as he is player 2).
I signed up today to comment in this thread, so don’t mock me too heavily. :)
Edit: Bumped iterations to 30 and hit points to 80,000 to try to smooth out randomness in the results.
Wow, that OkCupid result is surprising. It has not been my experience. What are you doing that causes people to reach out to you in a friendly (rather than romantic) way on there? (Or are you the one reaching out?)
And I agree with regard to the intellectual standard, especially if you consider your intelligence a defining characteristic. Reading the discussion here (and not having much to contribute) has… recontextualized my own self-image.