User:Kay Dekker/Spading

Badly romantic arrows and puttied monsters

Monsters summoned by using Fire a badly romantic arrow are believed to arrive with a (presumably flat) time distribution of [15...25] turns.

This is probably scheduled by decrementing a counter. The counter may be decremented within adventure.php, since it seems (tentatively) that putty combats, which instead call combat.php directly, don't decrement the counter. If so, sometimes more than 25 turns will elapse between firing the arrow and the first romanced monster showing up. The major purpose of this spading exercise is to investigate this possible effect.

I'm collecting data in this way:

• Summoning a monster from a 4-d camera or a photocopied monster (I'm using clod hoppers – any monster should work except Bricko monsters, whose combats are known not to cost a turn) and noting the turn counter as n₀.

• Capturing the monster in a camera for the next day's use, puttying it, arrowing it and killing it.

• Exhausting the putty sheet by doing a summon-copy-kill loop. This will always use five turns, since that's how many times you can summon with putty per day, and I'm not using my putty otherwise.

• Adventuring normally until the first romanced monster shows up, and noting the turn counter as n₁.

• Adventuring normally until the second and third (I'm using a quake of arrows, so I get three rather than two) romanced monsters to show up, and noting the turn counter as n₂ and n₃ respectively.

• Tabulating the results for later analysis.

Data section

Results so far

Day count	n0	n1	n2	n3
1	215	189	165	143
2	218	195	170	146
3	218	190	172	148
4	235	209	192	170
5	220	190	166	143
6	232	205	188	172
7	234	212	190	166
8	222	194	178	159
9	235	205	180	164
10	225	202	181	166
11	235	211	196	172
12	234	210	187	169
13	235	205	182	157
14	237	213	188	167
15	234	211	196	172
16	234	211	186	161
17	234	213	197	178
18	234	209	184	160
19	236	207	190	171
20	234	204	186	167
21	235	204	182	162
22	235	209	185	164
23	235	213	194	177
24	238	211	194	174
25	234	209	187	167
26	234	207	191	169