Excavation Site Gems
After spending some donuts on shovels, I've noticed that the gem always seems to be next to the rocks. Example: - - - - Rock Rock Gem Rock - - - - Rock Anyone seen it ...
Forum Discussion
"tapperino_forums;c-1623642" wrote:"teo47;c-1623593" wrote:"jtgroth;c-1623587" wrote:
I haven't done the math yet on long term averages. This is just a gut feeling about what that math might reveal.
The long term average for HappyGamer73's best strategy so far, in his order as he posted it, is 6.056 shovels per round. I will look later at if it changes anything or how much it changes to start with the outside squares and work in.
The probability calculation was a bit easier than I originally thought it would be, given that the initial placement of the gem is random and it's more or less just a process of figuring out how many squares it would take to find the gem in each of the 36 possible starting points. Average together those 36 numbers and there you have it.
Did you take account of hitting a rock, because that is the complicating factor. What are the chances of hitting a rock (given that there are three different arrangements of rocks with three different frequencies), and then the chances of hitting the gem after the rock depending on 2, 3 or 4 squares where the gem might be ?
Yes, I took that into account. When taking into account the chances of hitting the gem after finding a rock, I always first chose the adjacent square above the rock (or to the right of the rock if there was no square above) and went clockwise. So for a square with 3 adjacent ones to check, I had one square that needed one extra square to find the gem, one square that needed two extra squares, and one square that needed all three extra squares. In reality it doesn't matter if you check the adjacent squares with a pattern or not due to the randomness, but the probabilities work out the same as what I did over the long run.
