misc/package_comparison.md

In expectopatronum/alea:

Comparison of available dice packages

Verena Haunschmid August 28, 2018

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)

## [1] 0.6445312

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

## [1] 0.005787037

The function getSumProbs() is more straightforward.

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

## $probabilities
##       Sum  Probability Ways to Roll
##  [1,]   3 0.0001286008            1
##  [2,]   4 0.0006430041            5
##  [3,]   5 0.0019290123           15
##  [4,]   6 0.0052726337           41
##  [5,]   7 0.0115740741           90
##  [6,]   8 0.0218621399          170
##  [7,]   9 0.0380658436          296
##  [8,]  10 0.0604423868          470
##  [9,]  11 0.0855195473          665
## [10,]  12 0.1132973251          881
## [11,]  13 0.1356738683         1055
## [12,]  14 0.1485339506         1155
## [13,]  15 0.1428755144         1111
## [14,]  16 0.1202417695          935
## [15,]  17 0.0784465021          610
## [16,]  18 0.0354938272          276
## 
## $average
## [1] 13.43017

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)

## Call:
## dice.roll(faces = 6, dice = 3, rolls = 5)
## 
##  Results after 5 rolls of 3 dice:
##    die_1 die_2 die_3
## 1:     1     2     2
## 2:     3     1     6
## 3:     2     5     4
## 4:     5     6     3
## 5:     3     2     2
## 
##  Frequency table for each occurrency:
##    die_1 die_2 die_3 N freq
## 1:     1     2     2 1  0.2
## 2:     3     2     2 1  0.2
## 3:     5     6     3 1  0.2
## 4:     2     5     4 1  0.2
## 5:     3     1     6 1  0.2
## 
##  Frequency table of the sums:
##    sum N freq cum_sum
## 1:   5 1  0.2     0.2
## 2:   7 1  0.2     0.4
## 3:  10 1  0.2     0.6
## 4:  11 1  0.2     0.8
## 5:  14 1  0.2     1.0
## 
##  Expectation value: 9.4

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")

## [1] "Rolls: [ *1* *1* 3 3 ]"

## [1] 8

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.