The probabilities of Can't Stop
Can't Stop is a
board game. Several players roll dice to try and be the first one
to get their pieces up three collumns. There are 11 columns labeled
2 through 12, and each corresponds to a pairing of two dice.
Players roll four dice and if there is no combination of two dice
that can add to one of the three collumns that they have mobile
pieces in, they bust. A central judgement in this game is
how likely am I to bust with these three columns? Not being
too efficient with probablility and as there are only a finite
number of possibilities, I decided to write a little program to
calculate the probabilities by counting. The program is written in
java and is here.
The program can either be invoked with
java csprb 6 7 8
where 6 7 8 is the roll that we want the probablitity
of, or with
java csprb all
in which case the probablities for all unique rolls are calculated.
As this won't change between runnings, the output, sorted by
ascending probability of busting, is here.
The format is ways-of-busting : roll : probability-of-busting
Jeff Kaufman : 2005
cbr at sccs dot swarthmore dot spam edu. Remove spam.
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