Pig the dice game/Player

Pig the dice game/Player is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be found in its talk page.

The task is to create a dice simulator and scorer of Pig the dice game and add to it the ability to play the game to at least one strategy.

• State here the play strategies involved.
• Simulate playing the game a number of times with two players of given strategies and report here summary statistics such as, but not restricted to, the influence of going first or which strategy seems stronger.

Game Rules

The game of Pig is a multiplayer game played with a single six-sided die. The object of the game is to reach 100 points or more. Play is taken in turns. On each person's turn that person has the option of either

1. Rolling the dice: where a roll of two to six is added to their score for that turn and the player's turn continues as the player is given the same choice again; or a roll of 1 loses the player's total points for that turn and their turn finishes with play passing to the next player.
2. Holding: The player's score for that round is added to their total and becomes safe from the effects of throwing a one. The player's turn finishes with play passing to the next player.

J

This is a partial implementation of the current task.

This is a routine to estimate the value of rolling, given the current total of rolls which the player is building (left argument) and the current total of rolls which are a permanent part of the player's score (right argument).

If the expected value is positive, it's probably in the best interest of the player to take the roll. That said, a more sophisticated strategy might play cautiously when a player is sufficiently ahead of the other player(s).

<lang j>pigval=:4 :0

 (+/%#)(-x),}.(1+i.6)<.100-y+x

)</lang>

Examples:

<lang j> 10 pigval 90 _1.66667</lang>

If we have 10 points from our current rolls and have 90 permanent points, rolling again is a bad idea.

<lang j> 0 5 10 15 20 pigval"0/60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 100

3.33333  3.33333  3.33333   3.33333  3.33333 3.33333  3.33333   3.16667   0
    2.5      2.5      2.5       2.5      2.5     2.5  2.33333 _0.833333  _5
1.66667  1.66667  1.66667   1.66667  1.66667     1.5 _1.66667  _5.83333 _10

0.833333 0.833333 0.833333 0.833333 0.666667 _2.5 _6.66667 _10.8333 _15

      0        0        0 _0.166667 _3.33333    _7.5 _11.6667  _15.8333 _20</lang>

If we have 70 permanent points (or less) we should probably re-roll when our uncommitted rolls total to less than 20.

<lang j> (1+i.19) ([,:1+i:~) +/ 0 < pigval"0/~ 1+i.100

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

98 97 96 95 93 92 91 90 89 87 86 85 84 82 81 80 78 77 75</lang>

This is a table of decision points. First row represents sum of our current uncommitted rolls. Second row represents the maximum permanent score where you should roll again with that number of uncommitted points, if we are using this estimation mechanism to choose our actions. Note that the first four columns here should be obvious -- for example, if we have 96 permanent points and we have rolled 4 uncommitted points, we have won the game and we gain nothing from rerolling..

Reference

• Pig (dice)