AnyDice Classic Archive 19

First AnyDice 2 field test

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I've been in stealth mode for a while, but it's high time I started talking about AnyDice 2!

AnyDice 2 is not yet complete. There's no interface to speak of, and half its features don't work yet, but despite that it can already do a fair bit. It's fast too!

Quite recently, a charming fellow (using the handle chance.thirteen at the Forge) asked me for help in computing a "roll Xd10 keep highest 5" problem, with X ranging up to 25. This is a complex problem. AnyDice 1 can only handle 6d10h5 (which requires 8 seconds), anything higher is simply too much.

An excellent test for AnyDice 2! Here are the results up to 20d10h5.

And here's how long it took to compute.

Quite an improvement! While AD1 already chokes on 7 dice, AD2 can go up to 15 dice before it would hit the 30 second execution limit of the website. Up to 10 dice it's practically instantaneous. Assuming that not many people would want to throw more than 10 dice for a case like this – let alone more than 15 – AD2's performance is acceptable.

Of course, even AD2 isn't practical for really high amounts of dice with a problem like this. Because it has higher than linear complexity, you'll always hit a wall pretty soon. For example, 25 dice already took 19 minutes to compute. So with a desktop version of AD2 you could maybe get up to 30 dice, but anything above that would be impractical.

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