Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

@newpaintbrush:

@frood:

There’s a considerable difficulty in displaying most likely COMBINED results as you are suggesting, especially in a large battle such as you describe. Each side has about 50 units, and it is reasonable that each side might survive with as many as 25 units … wait - I was going to say that you then have a possibility of 25*25 total possible outcomes,

Haha!  I wrote an analytic calculator once that DID break down the values.  But it always crashed my browser whenever I used it for more than fifteen units because it had to do so many calculations!  Although I think I know a way to fix that nowadays.

It isn’t 25*25 total possible outcomes with a 50 on 50 battle.  Depending on attack or retreat, it’s clearly 2^100, even if the odds for either extreme are astronomically low.  25 * 25 is only 625 outcomes.  2^100 is 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 outcomes.

I have to wonder just what sort of “logic” your dice roller program uses . . . maybe you should stick the code on here and let us have a look-see.

Whadjoo use to make that webpage anyways?  Quark or somethin?  All that funny formatting in the HTML . . .

I have to say I don’t much care for your tone. It sounds like you’re slagging my math, my logic, and my HTML code. But because I’m the patient sort, I’ll respond politely, even if my flame finger is feeling itchy. I want this thread to be for improving the sim, not for flame wars.

In terms of “logic” that my dice roller uses: it rolls the results of a battle thousands of times and tracks how often each side survives with a different number of units. It is not an analytic calculator. It gets used about 10,000 times a month and only very occasionally do I get an e-mail from someone saying the results don’t seem right. That hasn’t happened in a while. So no, you don’t get to see my source code, at least not if you can’t ask nicely.

I think you might be stretching it with 2^100, and saying that this is “clearly” so just sounds pretentious. It sounds like anyone who can’t see that must be a cretin.

At least without retreats, there is a range of results of maximum 100 possible outcomes, where one or both players by definition will have 0 units surviving. Allowing for retreats probably increases this by a few orders of magnitude, but not to 2^100. The possible results are limited by the order of loss and other aspects of the game mechanics. In any case, since the sim works by actually rolling the results randomly many times over, I only care about the results that happen at least once every 10,000 battles, and I can limit the display to only show results that have a significant probability. No one needs to know about a possible outcome that only happens once in 2^100 or whatever, or even only 1 in 10,000.

As for the HTML source, I am not some quarkhead or frontpage newbie. It’s all hand-coded, and the “funny formatting” you refer to is called inline styles. Usually I control all the style with a separate stylesheet, but because the results also get e-mailed, I have to stick them in-line. Since the source is generated by a PHP script, inline styles are less of a disadvantage, because there is still a single point of control in the PHP script. Or if you mean the way the HTML itself is formatted, that’s because it is generated by a PHP script and indentation etc. is not an issue for me in the final page that is built, since I do my debugging at the PHP level.

If you weren’t being rude, sorry if I misunderstood. You have to be careful online :)

@Jennifer:

Actually, I was thinking since you give the amount of money lost, it might be possible to just say:  If you attack with 9 Infantry you’ll probably kill 2 infantry and loose 1 infantry to return fire.

(LL would say 1.5 kills, rounded up to 2 hits; 0.67 kills, rounded up to 1 hits.)

Also, I noticed that if you hit a 1 round only 5000 attempt simulation (you attack for 1 round, but it computes 5000 attempts at the same round) it doesn’t give you even an average monetary loss.  Maybe I’m just blind.  /shrug.

Heard a complaint that it’s not emailing results anymore.  Tested a couple of tries to my own inbox, havn’t gotten results yet.  Maybe just a slow server?

Must have been a slow server - I didn’t fix anything.

Did you do the 5000x simulation with “No Luck” mode? Because it should show the averages just as normal.

Switch and Jennifer, are you suggesting just stating in one line what the most likely result for the attacker is, the most likely result for the defender, and the amount they survive with and lose in that case?

paintbrush - sounds like I took you a little too seriously. never mind.

Okay, I’ve posted a beta to test at http://frood.net/aaa/ - this has highlighting on the results that are closest to the calculated average, and added to each line is a list of the units that have been lost.

I made some changes to the overall code that I think increases the speed of the script by about 20%. Not much, but what the heck. Because of this though there may be glitches. I’d appreciate some beta testing so I don’t launch the update on the main site and then find out that suddenly subs are hitting aircraft or whatever.

Switch, that glitch is intentional. I’m highlighting the average result, not the most common result. Two reasons: the most common result can be quickly identified visually because it has the longest bar graph bar. Second, the average is a better indication of what result to expect on the whole. Because the overall percentages given in the first chart describe the average outcome, and Jennifer was asking what those 24.3 units meant, ie. how can you have .3 of a tank, highlighting that line makes it a good reference point for understanding the overall results shown at the top.

I’ve updated the beta at http://www.frood.net/aaa/ with some more enhancements to the output. It now lists the units lost by each side as well as the IPC value of those units, which makes it easy to see the relative losses and costs to be expected by either side.

I’m now leaning away from doing combined results, eg:
2.4% Attacker with X units and Defender with Y units
1.8% Attacker with X and Defender with Z
3.3% Attacker with W and Defender with Y
0.7% Attacker with W and Defender with Z  etc.

Ultimately I think that’s harder to understand, and in any case, if you are doing battle to the death, you can assume that the 16% of the time that you survive with X units the Defender has lost all their units.

I’m going to do a bit more testing with the different kinds of combat to make sure I haven’t broken anything, and then I’ll launch this on the main site later tonight.

Okay, I get it now. I can highlight both and keep everyone happy!

Okay, I’ve launched the new version. It includes both kinds of result highlighting and Heavy Bombers now work properly in LHTR rules. The double rolling is not displayed (only the lower of the two dice is showed), but you’ll find that if 99 H. Bombers attack, they will score about 85-90 hits.

Thanks for the help. Let me know if you spot any more bugs. By now there are so many configurations in which to test this program that I can’t really test for them all, so my only way of hearing about bugs is when others let me know.

He he. I wrote “is showed” - that’s not right!

Okay, this post serves no purpose other than to inflate my post count - how much longer do I have to be a lowly infantry. Hey, can I give myself a special title in my profile? (goes to check…)

New feature that might be pretty cool:

I’ve added the ability to bookmark a scenario. Also, the link to the scenario is included in the e-mail, so when someone sends you a battle result, you can click on the link and toy with the scenario, see what their odds were etc.

Also, this will allow me to create a page of presets for certain first round attacks. I could use some help if people would set up the attacks and e-mail them to me using the dicey, then I’ll create a page with the links I get. Also, they could get posted to forums for discussion etc.: example : Link to 4 Arm v. 4 Arm

Don’t know why I didn’t do this way back, it was pretty easy to implement.

Example:

More changes at http://frood.net/aacalc/ :

• Option to swap the Defender’s and Attacker’s units. This way you can see what might happen if you decide not to attack and your opponent then attacks you instead with the same forces.
• Option to just evaluate the value of your units. Displays Unit count, punch and IPC value. May be useful as a tool in purchasing units, and with an e-mail address entered you could use this to submit unit purchases.
• Cleaned up the form a bit.

Now it’s time I focused on some other things…