Verena Haunschmid August 28, 2018
Besides alea other packages related to casting dice are available. In case you are looking for functionality which is not provided by alea, this list gives you an overview over the packages I found and the description they provided:
- dice: Calculate probabilities of various dice-rolling events
- Rdice: R package to simulate dice rolls, combinatorical and best choice problems.
- diceSyntax: dice roller with standard syntax
This document shows a few of the use cases where another package might be more suitable for you.
library(dice)The package dice is a package for calculating probabilities of various dice-rolling events, so this is something completely different from what alea is doing. The package consists of two functions: (a) getEventProb() and (b) getSumProbs(). The package is not very well documented and the functionality of getEventProb() was not immediately clear to me. So I try to explain it in more detail.
The first three examples are taken from the manual of the package.
getEventProb(nrolls = 6,
ndicePerRoll = 1,
nsidesPerDie = 4,
eventList = list(4, 3, c(1,2)),
orderMatters = FALSE)## [1] 0.6445312
getEventProb(nrolls = 3,
ndicePerRoll = 2,
nsidesPerDie = 6,
eventList = list(10, 4, c(2:6, 8:12)),
orderMatters = TRUE)## [1] 0.005787037
The function getSumProbs() is more straightforward.
getSumProbs(ndicePerRoll = 5,
nsidesPerDie = 6,
nkept = 3,
dropLowest = TRUE)## $probabilities
## Sum Probability Ways to Roll
## [1,] 3 0.0001286008 1
## [2,] 4 0.0006430041 5
## [3,] 5 0.0019290123 15
## [4,] 6 0.0052726337 41
## [5,] 7 0.0115740741 90
## [6,] 8 0.0218621399 170
## [7,] 9 0.0380658436 296
## [8,] 10 0.0604423868 470
## [9,] 11 0.0855195473 665
## [10,] 12 0.1132973251 881
## [11,] 13 0.1356738683 1055
## [12,] 14 0.1485339506 1155
## [13,] 15 0.1428755144 1111
## [14,] 16 0.1202417695 935
## [15,] 17 0.0784465021 610
## [16,] 18 0.0354938272 276
##
## $average
## [1] 13.43017
For better understanding, let me compute the probabilities of a more commonly used example (e.g., for teaching). Casting a 6-sided dice for two times.
probs <- getSumProbs(ndicePerRoll = 2,
nsidesPerDie = 6,
nkept = 2)
probs <- data.frame(probs$probabilities)
ggplot(probs) + geom_col(aes(x=Sum, y=Ways.to.Roll)) + scale_x_discrete(limits=probs$Sum)
The package Rdice contains a set of function that can do similar things as alea.
library(Rdice)The core function seems to be dice.roll(). It produced a lot of output in a complicated list structure which does not make it very useful for other applications.
The following example is taken from the help page of the function an casts 3 6-sided dice 5 times each.
dice.roll(faces = 6, dice = 3, rolls = 5)## Call:
## dice.roll(faces = 6, dice = 3, rolls = 5)
##
## Results after 5 rolls of 3 dice:
## die_1 die_2 die_3
## 1: 1 2 2
## 2: 3 1 6
## 3: 2 5 4
## 4: 5 6 3
## 5: 3 2 2
##
## Frequency table for each occurrency:
## die_1 die_2 die_3 N freq
## 1: 1 2 2 1 0.2
## 2: 3 2 2 1 0.2
## 3: 5 6 3 1 0.2
## 4: 2 5 4 1 0.2
## 5: 3 1 6 1 0.2
##
## Frequency table of the sums:
## sum N freq cum_sum
## 1: 5 1 0.2 0.2
## 2: 7 1 0.2 0.4
## 3: 10 1 0.2 0.6
## 4: 11 1 0.2 0.8
## 5: 14 1 0.2 1.0
##
## Expectation value: 9.4
The package also contains three datasets of non-transitive dice, i.e. Efron dice (efron), Miwin dice (miwin) and Oskar (oskar).
The package contains a vignette with more detailed explanations.
The package diceSyntax contains several functions but only documentation for roll.
The package is only available on github.
devtools::install_github("oganm/diceSyntax")library(diceSyntax)The interesting part of this package is that you can pass dice events like 4d6 in order to cast 4 6-sided dice.
roll("4d6")## [1] "Rolls: [ *1* *1* 3 3 ]"
## [1] 8
More examples (e.g., keep highest/lowest 3, ...) can be found in the README of diceSyntax.