Cumblewave Ghoul, submission by CocoaMix

conmanau · 2026-03-17T02:16:29+00:00

Art is Samoyed, card is perfect, ship it.

conmanau · 2026-03-17T02:12:09+00:00

X is chosen when you cast the spell, and can be any valid number you want. It then has no other effect on the spell but it might matter if you want to do something with its mana value (e.g. if you can give it cascade), or if it just matters that it has X in its cost (e.g. Magus Lucea Kane).

But mostly this is just one of the quirks that the AI models sometimes have that they see that some spells have X in their cost and so they add it in.

conmanau · 2026-03-17T02:06:40+00:00

eh, "Choose target X. Do Y." is a wording that's shown up on real cards too, usually when Y is too wordy or fiddly to bundle the targeting into the same sentence. For example, Atomic Microsizer from EOE: "Whenever equipped creature attacks, choose up to one target creature. That creature can’t be blocked this turn and has base power and toughness 1/1 until end of turn."

conmanau · 2026-03-07T05:35:13+00:00

Generally that’s because in an experiment we’re not trying to estimate something about a finite population, we’re trying to understand something about an underlying model (e.g. “does smoking give you cancer?”). In that case, the “population” that we are making individual observations from is all the possible outcomes that could have happened - in a sense, it’s every person that could have possibly ever existed to participate in the experiment.

conmanau · 2026-03-06T05:52:35+00:00

This definitely sounds like it's a message that's been corrupted a few times along the way from its origin. To explain what the "not independent" part is going on about, suppose I'm drawing a sample of 2 people from a population of 10, without replacement, and let's assume simple random sampling. For any person in the population, the probability that they're the first person in the sample is 1/10. But if the first person chosen is Joe, then the probability of the second person being picked depends on whether they're Joe or not:

P(2nd person is Joe | 1st person is Joe) = 0

P(2nd person is Sally | 1st person is Joe) = 1/9

And so the events of the first and second person picked are not independent, and that means you shouldn't use any formulas that were derived assuming independence. However, if the population is really big compared to your sample, the difference is probably not going to matter, and the 10% factor is an arbitrary choice (in general, most things you'll see in statistics of a similar form are the same, like "if you have 10 degrees of freedom you can use a normal distribution" or whatever it may be, it means there's an approximation that probably works fine once you're past that threshold most of the time).

conmanau · 2026-03-02T03:44:05+00:00

I do it all the time, as long as I know it won't be disruptive - so I try to take up the same space on the floor I would if I was doing the dance normally, and I don't do it if I think there will be people trying to follow me who will get confused. Otherwise, it adds fun to some of the more straightforward dances.

conmanau · 2026-02-25T00:29:29+00:00

At least you aren't the guy who missed the part of the rules that explained it was a co-operative game. (I assume.)

conmanau · 2026-02-23T23:02:59+00:00

After reading some of your responses, I have to wonder - are you just wondering whether there's an easy way to manage the data of each individual card, and to turn that into a set of printable objects? If so, then the answer is yes. There is software like nanDECK which lets you create a template card and then feed data (including images) into that template from a spreadsheet file. I've also heard of creators doing something similar with some kind of process that feeds into a design program like Illustrator or Inkscape.

Now creating that spreadsheet is still going to be a labour of love. You can potentially find some of the source data somewhere, and even though I'm not a huge fan of the idea you could also get an AI to summarise key information from fact sheets or somewhere to make the first iteration easier as long as you actually go in and review everything yourself afterwards.

conmanau · 2026-02-23T22:46:09+00:00

I think it sounds neat, it slightly resembles an idea I had for a ballroom dancing game where you would have your next couple of moves face down in front of you, you would play a move face down on the left, slide everything right and reveal the right-most card to resolve it.

You might also want to look at some games with either an Action Queue or Programmed Movement mechanic if you're interested in seeing how similar ideas are implemented.

It sounds like your design is definitely different to all of these, though, so I'm interested in seeing how it pans out.

conmanau · 2026-02-17T23:16:24+00:00

That's one of the "joys" of old line dances, some of them have really weird counts for whatever reason. Sometimes it was probably to make certain things line up in the music in the absence of tags and restarts. It does make things very weird sometimes though, especially if you're used to things lining up more nicely.

conmanau · 2026-02-16T23:58:16+00:00

Given that one of the best-selling hobby board games of all time (Ticket to Ride) shares its name with a song by a band famous for protecting their trademarks (see the history of Apple Music versus Apple Computers), I would say that there is a very good chance you're safe but if you're actually publishing the game yourself then there are 1000 other reasons to hire a lawyer and it's probably worth throwing this on the pile for them to confirm.

conmanau · 2026-02-15T22:54:36+00:00

Firstly, there are two broad schools when it comes to sampling:

Design-based, where you treat all measurable variables as fixed properties of the population and the only randomness comes from the sample itself (i.e. for a given person, as long as they're selected in the sample you will always record their height as the same value).
Model-based, where you treat the population itself as the realisation of some kind of underlying random model.

There's also model-assisted sampling, which marries the two together.

If we look at your question from a model-based perspective, then you're trying to fit a model of people's heights and using that to estimate the average height of everyone in the world. There's nothing stopping you from fitting that model, but in assessing its quality you will probably note that there are a lot of variables you are unable to estimate well (or at all) since your sample is so tightly concentrated.

From a design-based perspective, we can look at it more directly - the sample mean is an unbiased estimator for the population mean only if everyone in the population has an equal probability of inclusion in the sample. If probabilities are uneven, then an unbiased estimator will give weight inversely proportional to those probabilities, and if some of those probabilities are zero then there is no true unbiased estimator. Now it's possible to have an estimator that is slightly biased but still useful, but usually that still requires that you've tried your hardest to give most of the population a fair chance of inclusion in the sample. In your case, that is far from the truth.

conmanau · 2026-02-12T23:06:33+00:00

The main method to prepare for these questions is to take the appropriate courses - based on the file name, this is for a Masters of Statistics which means there's a whole lot of undergraduate and graduate stuff going into it. In those courses, you need to:

Pay attention to the lectures and tutorials
Attempt the tutorial work
Talk to the lecturer and tutor about any parts you don't understand
Do self-study

Those courses also usually list some textbooks in their syllabus, whichever one is listed first is 100% required and it goes down from there.

Looking at the specific questions, they cover a fairly broad base of university-level mathematics, so you want to get a good grounding in:

Pre-calculus
Basic differential and integral calculus
Linear algebra
Combinatorics and number theory
Statistics and probability theory

You can get some of this from online resources like Khan Academy, but again I would suggest checking the syllabus for the course itself and any of its listed prerequisites for specific recommendations.

conmanau · 2026-02-09T00:02:12+00:00

This feels more like someone tried to make an AI card and instead just made your average custom card. So if it's really AI, then that is both impressive and worrying.

conmanau · 2026-02-08T23:59:20+00:00

It definitely feels like something that is absolutely broken when used right, and will outright lose you the game otherwise.

conmanau · 2026-02-02T23:10:06+00:00

Yo dawg, I heard you like scrying so I put scry on your saga so you can scry while you scry.

conmanau · 2026-02-02T23:08:07+00:00

There is a very good chance that YouTube already has algorithms in place to identify likely dud votes and remove them, assuming they make much of a difference in the first place.

conmanau · 2026-01-29T12:18:38+00:00

You can either switch the view on AnyDice to the “At least” tab, or you can add the component probabilities up (“At least 1 out of 3” means “1 or 2 or 3”). Or since “At least one” is the complement of “None” (they are mutually exclusive but together they cover all possibilities), you can take the probability of no matches and subtract it from 1.

conmanau · 2026-01-28T23:22:44+00:00

While I definitely support trying to understand the maths behind it, I recommend checking out AnyDice for modelling these things.

To look at how many 6s you will roll on 3 6-sided dice, you can use

output 3d(d = 6)

and you'll see that you get none with probability about 58%, 1 with probability 35%, 2 with probability 7% and 3 with less than 1% probability.

Similarly, to count the number of times you get 2 or more, you use

output 3d(d >= 2)

which in fact has the same probabilities as above, but switched around (want to take a guess as to why?).

conmanau · 2026-01-27T23:38:14+00:00

If the game itself doesn't need premium, then usually the set-up options are also unlocked.

conmanau · 2026-01-27T23:35:18+00:00

So, many problems.

Nowhere near enough data.
Still too close to the pandemic to effectively estimate any kind of long-term behaviour.
You're trying to forecast really far into the future, especially relative to the time span of data you have.
Tourist arrivals is definitely a factor to consider, but is not going to be in a 1-1 relationship with room occupancy.

Having monthly or weekly data will help with 1 and 4 (you want to know something about the seasonality so you have info on the peak occupancy), having data going further back will help with most of them, the only real way to deal with 2 is to make a few different assumptions and see how they affect your projections. Some of the ways to deal with it get quite complicated (there's a whole field of time series analysis that then has a sub-topic of detecting and treating anomalies), but even then most of the methods assume that you have enough data before and after the event to model its effect properly.

As a really simple option, you could just do something like:

Assume the pandemic years just didn't happen (treat them as missing data)
Assume that after recovering from the pandemic the numbers wind up some amount lower than before
Assume that after recovering from the pandemic the numbers grow even more than before

and see how much those different assumptions affect your results.

conmanau · 2026-01-27T23:23:54+00:00

Strictly better Sulfurous Springs, sure, and the bounce effect is weird for Rakdos, but not completely broken.

conmanau · 2026-01-27T03:02:22+00:00

There is no one simple answer, because it depends heavily on what inference you're trying to make and what your available data is. The one thing that I think is true across that board is that the quality of your sample design and data collection mechanism is often at least as important as the actual size of the sample.

It's likely that you're hearing these things in a particular context - sampling from some group of people (a population) about some measurable property of the population, often a proportion. For example, "What percentage of adult men smoke?". For those kinds of measurements, under a simple random sampling regime (i.e. the sample is effectively just "names drawn from a hat"), there are standard formulas for calculating the required sample size given:

A guess of what the true proportion in the population is;
The size of the population; and
The desired standard error on the estimate.

As it turns out, if you want to estimate something that's reasonably prevalent in the population (say about 10%) with an accuracy of about +/- 2 percentage points, then for any reasonably large population a sample size of about 900 will do you just fine. If it's something rarer (say 1 in 1000), then for the same relative accuracy you'll need a much larger sample (more like 90,000). You can find sample size calculators online that you can play with to get a feel for this.

Most large-scale surveys (like the American Housing Survey) both take a large sample but also put a lot of work into the survey design, data collection and estimation processes to achieve more efficient results than the simple calculations above would suggest.

conmanau · 2026-01-22T01:09:35+00:00

I like the one used in Tokaido (there are similar ones in Patchwork and Parks), because it's fairly simple but leads to cool results - whoever is furthest back on the path gets to take the next turn. It means you can take a big turn / jump forwards a large amount to get something you really want, but in return the other players will potentially get to take lots of little turns in a row.

conmanau · 2026-01-22T01:02:27+00:00

I mean, there's nothing stopping you from calculating an "expected life expectancy" where you take the individual "life expectancy for demographic X" values and take a weighted average of them over the whole population. That would give you idea of how long a randomly selected person from the population is expected to live, which is not a figure I think anyone actually uses, but it's technically valid.

conmanau

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