Talk:Proposals/Actor Generation

This seems like you want to use a uniform probability distribution for the actor stats. You just give a minimum and a maximum value and each value within is equally likely. I don't think that this is a very good choice. You get a very broad distribution with the average value beeing exactly as likely as the minimum and the maximum. Moreover you have a sharp cutoff.

I think most people are average and there are only a few who are much better or worse than this average. To reflect this I suggest to use a normal (gaussian) distribution and instead of giving a minimum and a maximum value you would have to use a list with the average value and a standard deviation. --Camouflage 15:42, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

I included a table so all of you who are not so familiar with probability distributions can compare the two distributions. The example is for the strenght of a common soldier; p is a uniform probability distribution with fixed minimum and maximum and each value within equally likely. pn is a normal distribution with average value 20 (same as for p) and a standard deviation of 5 (which is a bit smaller than the standard deviation of p).

str	p	pn
8	0.00	0.00
9	0.00	0.01
10	0.05	0.01
11	0.05	0.02
12	0.05	0.02
13	0.05	0.03
14	0.05	0.04
15	0.05	0.05
16	0.05	0.06
17	0.05	0.07
18	0.05	0.07
19	0.05	0.08
20	0.05	0.08
21	0.05	0.08
22	0.05	0.07
23	0.05	0.07
24	0.05	0.06
25	0.05	0.05
26	0.05	0.04
27	0.05	0.03
28	0.05	0.02
29	0.05	0.02
30	0.05	0.01
31	0.00	0.01
32	0.00	0.00

--Camouflage 16:27, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be nice if this could be "upgraded" with armour-style definitions, so aliens could have the strengths and weaknesses the UFOpedia states? And maybe UGVs could use them as well. --DarkRain 02:46, 23 November 2009 (UTC)