In expectopatronum/alea:

knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
library(ggplot2)

Available packages

Besides alea other packages related to casting dice are available. In case you are looking for functionality which is not provided by alea, this list gives you an overview over the packages I found and the description they provided:

• dice: Calculate probabilities of various dice-rolling events
• Rdice: R package to simulate dice rolls, combinatorical and best choice problems.
• diceSyntax: dice roller with standard syntax

This document shows a few of the use cases where another package might be more suitable for you.

dice

library(dice)

The package dice is a package for calculating probabilities of various dice-rolling events, so this is something completely different from what alea is doing. The package consists of two functions: (a) getEventProb() and (b) getSumProbs(). The package is not very well documented and the functionality of getEventProb() was not immediately clear to me. So I try to explain it in more detail.

The first three examples are taken from the manual of the package.

getEventProb(nrolls = 6,
             ndicePerRoll = 1,
             nsidesPerDie = 4,
             eventList = list(4, 3, c(1,2)),
             orderMatters = FALSE)

getEventProb(nrolls = 3,
             ndicePerRoll = 2,
             nsidesPerDie = 6,
             eventList = list(10, 4, c(2:6, 8:12)),
             orderMatters = TRUE)

The function getSumProbs() is more straightforward.

getSumProbs(ndicePerRoll = 5,
            nsidesPerDie = 6,
            nkept = 3,
            dropLowest = TRUE)

For better understanding, let me compute the probabilities of a more commonly used example (e.g., for teaching). Casting a 6-sided dice for two times.

probs <- getSumProbs(ndicePerRoll = 2,
            nsidesPerDie = 6,
            nkept = 2)
probs <- data.frame(probs$probabilities)
ggplot(probs) + geom_col(aes(x=Sum,  y=Ways.to.Roll)) + scale_x_discrete(limits=probs$Sum)

Rdice

The package Rdice contains a set of function that can do similar things as alea.

library(Rdice)

The core function seems to be dice.roll(). It produced a lot of output in a complicated list structure which does not make it very useful for other applications.

The following example is taken from the help page of the function an casts 3 6-sided dice 5 times each.

dice.roll(faces = 6, dice = 3, rolls = 5)

The package also contains three datasets of non-transitive dice, i.e. Efron dice (efron), Miwin dice (miwin) and Oskar (oskar).

The package contains a vignette with more detailed explanations.

diceSyntax

The package diceSyntax contains several functions but only documentation for roll.

The package is only available on github.

devtools::install_github("oganm/diceSyntax")

library(diceSyntax)

The interesting part of this package is that you can pass dice events like 4d6 in order to cast 4 6-sided dice.

roll("4d6")

More examples (e.g., keep highest/lowest 3, ...) can be found in the README of diceSyntax.

expectopatronum/alea documentation built on May 17, 2019, 1:04 p.m.