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)