Thank you for posting this. I agree with the advertised ratings. I particularly liked that some were a lot easier to catch than others, and you could gradually make progrees.
Nettie Silver is always in the city.
Either one of Azeru or Cayn are always in the city.
Either Archiwise the Bald or Boltholopew are always in the city
When the above are excluded the only pair of mages where at least one is present in the city when Bumblepox and Scramblepox are cured are Azure and Danny Nova are always in the city. So accuse them of those.
When Chucklepox or Gurglepox are cure there are two different pairs where at least one was in the city. Danny Nova and Dankon Ground look the most likely culprits for Gurglepox. Lomerius Xardus and Danny Nova look like the most likely pair for Chucklepox.
Mildly But Persistently Itchy Throat is always cured when Dankon Ground is on the opposite side of the city, so accuse him of this.
Tehami Darke is always in sector 6 when a case of Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome is healed in sectors 1,2, and 12. He is always in the city when a case of this is healed. This is enough to provisionally assign all the other cases to him.
Both Boltholopew and Moon Finder are always in an adjacent sector when Problems Disorder, Parachondria, and Disease Syndrome are healed. There appears to be no obvious way to discriminate between them. Maybe they are collaborating to make it more difficult for the authorities to discover them? Under the principle of innocent unless proven guilty I can't accuse either of them of it though. If I was trying to maximise thr profit I made I would accuse both of them as it seems more likely that both of them would be involved than neither of them.
Only about 3/4 of healings had a mage present in the sector at the time, so either we have cases of mages healing in sectors other than the one where they are in, or there is some other source of healing.
A mage is only reliably present when Babblepox, Scraped Elbow, Scraped Knee, and Smokesickness is cured.
Nettie Silver was always in the sector where Smokesickness was cured, so accuse her of this.
Zancro was always in the sector where Scraped Knee and scraped elbow was cured so accuse him of these.
Danny Nova was always in the sector where babblepox is healed so accuse her of this.,
There are a couple of instances where a mage is always present when a disease is cured in a specific sector. This is always sector 4, 5, or 6. It is probably not a coincidence that there is a special building in each of these sectors. Most of them only occurred a small number of times though, so they might be a statistical fluke. The two exceptions are chucklepox in sector 5 and Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome in sector 6. Tehami Darke is always in sector 6 when a case of Disquietingly Serene Bowel Syndrome is healed in that sector, so accuse him of that. I can't see anything obvious for sector 5 though.
Thank you for posting this. I found it more difficult than most to untangle the rules behind what was going on, but easier than most to find a candidate that I could be reasonably confident would do a lot better than random selection (Which then turned out to be the best). Possibly having more candidates to choose from, with a smaller difference between the top candidates, would have made ML more effective relative to pure analysis.
I would prefer it if the next one came a week later as I am expecing to be very busy that week.
I am going for number 11, mainly because other adventurers with predictions similar to 11 did unusually well.
Thank you for posting this. Getting a very good or pefect answer felt a lot easier than most, however getting from a very good answer to a perfect answer seemed more difficult than most. I identified a very good answer very quickly just by looking for combinations that were present in the dataset. It was then rather frustrating to make a lot of progress in untangling the rules and still being unable to find a better solution than the first one I found. Overalll I would rate it as difficulty = 2/5 playability 2/5 where 3 is an average D and D puzzle.
!> I was able to generalise the formula to a wide range of scenrios involving heades, but the eyes are more complicated. Aside from forceing the tax to 0 when it would otherwise be relatively small I didn't find a consistent pattern. As I can't find anything obviously better I will stick with my original entry.
The tax is always the same for the same set of monster parts so no randomness is involved.
I then looked for entries where only one type of part was present. With the exception of the heads this gave some obvious formulas:
When only eyes are present no tax is paid
When only heads are present tax is 2.8 for 1, 8.4 for 2 21 for 3 and 29.4 for 4.
When only skulls are present tax is the number of skulls
When only hands are present the tax is 0.2 times the number of hands.
When only horns are present and their number is < 5 the tax is 1.4*number of horns, and 1.75*number of horns when >= 5 are present.
Next I looked for records where only two types of parts were present, but with the following the exceptions it didn't give anything obvious:
When only skulls and hands are present the tax rate is #SKULL + 0.2*#HAND
When only horns and hands are present the tax rate is:
1.4*#HORN + 0.4*#HAND provided the total tax bill is less than 6
else when horns < 5 and the total tax is < 18: 2.1*#HORN + 0.6*#HAND
else when horns < 5: 2.8*#HORN + 0.8*#HAND
When horns >= 5 : 1.75*#HORN + 0.5*#HAND
After much looking at the data a lot I was then able to find the following formulas when skulls, horns, and hands were all present:
1.4*#HORN + 0.4*#HAND + 2*#SKULL provided the result is < 6
Else 1.75*HORN + 0.5*HAND + 2.5*SKULL provided there are at least 5 horns
Else 2.1*#HORN + 0.6*#HAND + 3*SKULL provided the result is less than 18
Else 2.8*#HORN + 0.8*#HAND + 4*SKULL provided ther result is less than 40
Else 3.5*#HORN + 1*#HAND + 5*#SKULL
Eyes and particularly heads seem to introduce a lot of extra complexity.
The best record I could find with 4 eyes and 4 heads had 4 eyes, 4 heads and 1 hand, so I tried to give these to 1 adventurer, and then allocate the rest amonst the remaining 3 according to these formulas. However the result was worse than the best I could find by looking up the tax for various combinations in the datafile. I will therefor use this as my entry if I can't work out what is going on with the eyes/heads.
Adventurer 1: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(5)HORN(6)HAND(2)TAX: 23
Adventurer2: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(0)HORN(1)HAND(0)TAX: 0
Adventurer3: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(0)HORN(0)HAND(3)TAX: 0
Adventurer4: EYE(1)HEAD(1)SKULL(0)HORN(0)HAND(3)TAX: 0
Total estimated tax is 23
There is clearly some randomness to the results. Some individual foods clearly seem to go down better than other (A looks like it has the biggest individual effect). There are also seem to be a number of correlations between different foods, though I couldn't find a general pattern or disentagle it completly. Feasts with five or 6 dishes seems to go down best.
Based on what I was able to find ABFOP looks best to me, but I won't be surprised if better feasts are available.