The Perl here is nothing special, but the result turned out to be serendipitous and funky, as well as weird. I figured this is as good a place as any to post it.

I was asked by a friend to tell him the expected value of a DND status-roll. (You roll 4d6, and discard the lowest of the four.)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @sums;

for my $i (1..6) {
for my $j (1..6) {
for my $k (1..6) {
for my $l (1..6) {
    # get the sum for this dice-roll
    my $min = $i;
    if ($j < $min) { $min = $j; }
    if ($k < $min) { $min = $k; }
    if ($l < $min) { $min = $l; }
    
    my $sum = $i+$j+$k+$l-$min;
    $sums[$sum]++;
    $sums[0]++;
}}}}

my $e = 0;
for (3..18) {
    $e += $_*($sums[$_]/$sums[0]);
}

print "e = $e\n";

[download]

Suggestions for how to make this smaller and Perlisher are welcome. I'm sure this can be compressed to a one-liner, somehow...

Anyhoo, the expected value comes out to be 12.2445987654321... Isn't that weird?

Kinda like noticing that 9876543211 is prime...

In reply to Rolling DND Dice. by grendelkhan

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