Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
ethanmarkowitz.com
Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#2That is just the analysis I think about doing every time I play Chutes and Ladders with my daughter. I think "I should just simulate this game, it would be much more fun."
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#3Great read. I have one suggestion:
Get better games.
My 5 year old LOVES King of Tokyo playing with me as a family. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70323/king-tokyo
Also Animal Upon Animal is a fun game with my kid. It is a stacking game with animals and kids love it. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17329/animal-upon-animal
There are so many good games for kids and almost no one knows about them.
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#4Great read. I have one suggestion: Get better games. My 5 year old LOVES King of Tokyo playing with me as a family. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70323/king-tokyo Also Animal Upon Animal is a fun game with my kid. It is a stacking game with animals and kids love it. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17329/animal-upon-animal There are so many good games for kids and almost no one knows about them.
Also check out the aMAZEing labyrinth. There's a "junior" version, but in my experience most younger kids can figure out the regular "8+" game just fine.
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#5Thanks for this awesome analysis. I've been wanting to do a simulation of how much of Settlers of Catan is luck vs skill. Has anyone seen an analysis like this completed?
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#6Previously, related posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3386970
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6323427
The first of these is more sophisticated than the current post, because it calculates the distributions analytically using the fact that the move sequence is Markov and the transition matrix is known. So, exact probabilities can be found.
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#7Great read. I have one suggestion: Get better games. My 5 year old LOVES King of Tokyo playing with me as a family. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70323/king-tokyo Also Animal Upon Animal is a fun game with my kid. It is a stacking game with animals and kids love it. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17329/animal-upon-animal There are so many good games for kids and almost no one knows about them.
Chutes and Ladders, like Candyland, isn't so much a "game" as an exercise in following a procedure involving random chance. That's useful, and can be fun; it also has the useful property that an adult and a kid can play together with an equal chance of either "winning", and it can teach good sportsmanship.
But yes, there are many kid-friendly games to replace it with for kids who understand basic game concepts.
> Also Animal Upon Animal is a fun game with my kid. It is a stacking game with animals and kids love it. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17329/animal-upon-animal
I had something like that as a kid and loved it.
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#8The same topic on: http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12011/ with more in depth explanations.
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#9As a note for the quantative analysis aspect of the code, I strongly recommend looking into dplyr, especially since you have very many subset and column-wise operations: http://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/introdu...
I almost quit R due to the tedious verbosity of the default syntax, but dplyr made it simple and fast.
Re: Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R
#10I don't want to knock the article, since this kind of exploration is fun and well written blogs are always a joy to read.
But knowing some statistics, the entire of Snakes and Ladders is an absorbing markov chain [1] and can be very quickly analyzed as such without having to resort to sampling.
Random sampling is easy but take a step back and the entire state space is an integer in [1,100]. (Actually there are fewer than 100 states because the bottom of a ladder or top of a snake isn't a state).
The state transitions are very easy to model, they're just 1/6 to each of the 6 next states (sometimes fewer, in which case they just add).
Having constructed our markov chain, we can instantly and accurately get back our time-to-victory from each square.