KDice Trainer for iPhone is now on the App Store! Ryan worked on making a fast single player version of KDice that captures all of the elements that make kdice.com popular. You play against up to 6 out of 99 bots and work your way from 100th place up to 1st if you’re lucky.

The interface is clean and clear and allows you to configure the type of game (2-7 players, map size, difficult) without a configuration screen. Configuration screens are confusing and often make things more complex than required. In this app there is no configuration screen but instead these configuration options are built into the leaderboard where you select who you want to play.

The leaderboard has 99 bots named after some of the top KDice players. The AI is fairly complex giving each bot unique decision making combinations. As you work your way up the leaderboard the bots get smarter and harder to beat.

The touch screen on iPhones is a natural fit for selecting areas to attack. You simply slide your finger from the territory you’re attacking from to the territory you want to attack. Even with a full map attacking is easy and accurate.

The landing page:
http://iphone.kdice.com

On the App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=310652813&mt=8

I've been writing a single player version of KDice for the iphone over the past few months and need to start getting ready to launch it.

I wanted to reach out to the kdice community to see what kind of role you'd like to play. I was going to create a seperate community at iphone.kdice.com. Any volunteers to welcome iphone players there?

Also, I need to write a description for the trainer when it appears on itunes. I was thinking of something from this community explaining what kdice is (ie more than just a game of luck) and a challenge to compete against the best.

Let me know what you think.

Here's a sneak peek:
http://twitpic.com/2lc1v

Since Ryan changed the proportions of points going to first place, second, third, etc. at the beginning of February, to increase incentives for going for the win, the zero datum has to be recalculated to fit the TAZD (Test Against Zero Datum) to the new incentives. I have done so, with the following observations.

1. I took the top 1,013 zero-scoring players on the leaderboard. Of these, only 641 had played one or more regular game.

2. Of these 641, I took the player average of percentage profiles with the following result:

03.1 03.3 05.6 13.9 22.1 24.0 26.0

These are likely of not much use since most of the 641 players had played only one or a few games and their zero scores likely reflect only an incidental situation and not their true skill.

3. I then took a game-weighted average of the percentages and came up with

09.4 09.2 10.6 12.7 16.7 19.1 22.3

These do not differ much from the numbers under the old incentives and has the curious result that second place gets a little more emphasis than first. But they do differ in the predicted direction.

4. One factor thay may affect the reliability of the zero datum is the buy-in effect of tournament play. Some of the current occupants of the zero-score part of the leaderboard may be there because of net negative draw in tournaments. Players with negative skill in regular play are more likely to have positive draw. So I decided to do a draw-weighted set of percentages (which is equivalent to point-weighted number of finishes) with this result:

05.7 06.2 07.8 10.3 17.3 22.6 30.1

Which of these three sets of numbers is the best fit for a typical zero-score player in regular play?

I invite your comments.

Just a couple small changes this month from a few requests:

1) Point distribution has changed giving more to 1st place. Here's the old on a 0 table:
+60, +42, +30, 0, -30, -42, -60
and here's the new:
+100, +50, +25, 0, -20, -35, -50
Where are the extra points coming from? Last month I had thought I introduced the +70 points per game but instead I just raised the amount each player risks by 10. Well, the month had to play out because mid month changes are not cool. This month we have +70 points on all tables (which doesn't mean much on 5000). We'll get more point inflation from this but it should make things a bit more fun and should change game strategy slightly to favor getting 1st over 2nd or 3rd.

2) You can now join member tournies if you bought the one time point bonus but are not a member.

Thats it. Most of my free time this month has been spent getting the iphone single player version done. It's looking good and I hope to get it out soon.

What follows is a dendrogram, or family tree, of a sample of 100 kdicers. What it intends to show is relatedness of players to each other. For any two players, the highest value of "h", or height, between them, is a measure of dissimilarity between the two. If you find yourself in the tree, offer comments on the similarities or difference between you and your "relatives".

This particular sample of 100 players is hemidemiskrumic, meaning, four equally spaced groups of 25 players spanning skrum's group (page 56 on the leaderboard) and the top group (page 1). The other intervening groups are page 37 and page 19.

From your comments and my analysis I will try to come up with a comprehensive taxonomic system for the classification of kdicers.


[Update 29 January 2009]

The stat work for this analysis was done by an online website, the official citation of is:
Wessa, P., (2008), Hierarchical Clustering (v1.0.2) in Free Statistics Software (v1.1.23-r3), Office for Research Development and Education, URL http://www.wessa.net/rwasp_hierarchicalclustering.wasp/

The Ward method was used because it minimizes variance, which is the same as saying it uses as much of the information as possible. I used the raw percentage data for first through seventh place finishes to compute these results. Since in theory we have only six independent variables, I should need to use only six of the seven levels of finishes. So I ran the data with seventh place omitted. Some of the branches got moved around, including those belonging to MadHat_Sam, moondust, and fiero600. I also did a run with fourth place, instead of seventh place, removed. In theory the results should be the same no matter which place was removed, but such did not turn out to be the case. There is a greater variance in fourth place finishes than seventh place. Though fourth place makes the least contribution to overall kdice score, it can be argued that two players who have significantly different percentages for fourth, though their other percentages show similar shapes, have different playing styles and should be classified as different.

One source of error in the data is the truncation of the percentages by Ryan. This leads to a range in percentage sums from 95% to 100% for all seven places. To correct for this, I did a run with all seven places, but normalized by player percentage sum. This supposedly minor adjustment rearranged many of the minor branches of the trees, but left the leaf pairings undisturbed. Conclusion: the data must be normalized.

[end 29 January update]

Run with all seven places of finish, unnormalized:

--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 100 members at h = 1.39]
|--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.371]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.238]
| | |--leaf "boilerjon"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.169]
| | |--leaf "pulver toast man"
| | `--leaf "jimmcguinn"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.323]
| |--leaf "YevgenyBk"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.199]
| |--leaf "hjdfgeteyr"
| `--leaf "jim2674"
`--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 94 members at h = 1.29]
|--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 41 members at h = 0.631]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 13 members at h = 0.44]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.197]
| | | |--leaf "fiero600"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.119]
| | | |--leaf "jurlyk"
| | | `--leaf "Pharao"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 10 members at h = 0.226]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.129]
| | | |--leaf "komando80"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0697]
| | | |--leaf "Akila"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0424]
| | | |--leaf "mmmboobies"
| | | `--leaf "mangoo"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.199]
| | |--leaf "aardvarks"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 5 members at h = 0.143]
| | |--leaf "Pifi"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.103]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0648]
| | | |--leaf "brisk"
| | | `--leaf "skrumgaer"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0671]
| | |--leaf "lala123456"
| | `--leaf "Mirabilis"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 28 members at h = 0.544]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 11 members at h = 0.272]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 5 members at h = 0.128]
| | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0556]
| | | | |--leaf "fcuku"
| | | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0436]
| | | | |--leaf "Gdott"
| | | | `--leaf "Dr Leech"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0632]
| | | |--leaf "beyazguvercinus"
| | | `--leaf "GG.Schönebörger"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.136]
| | |--leaf "eurasianbro"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 5 members at h = 0.127]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0648]
| | | |--leaf "MsCat"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.049]
| | | |--leaf "ji-jo"
| | | `--leaf "Luin"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0825]
| | |--leaf "mr Kruezfeld"
| | `--leaf "Moroccan Jasmine"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 17 members at h = 0.418]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 9 members at h = 0.179]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.106]
| | | |--leaf "Shevar"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0624]
| | | |--leaf "lesplaydices"
| | | `--leaf "jpc4p"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.145]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0361]
| | | |--leaf "cnkcnk"
| | | `--leaf "Raubritter"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.0704]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.04]
| | | |--leaf "pityu"
| | | `--leaf "Shondven"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.049]
| | |--leaf "chaiNblade"
| | `--leaf "maurum"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 8 members at h = 0.201]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 5 members at h = 0.155]
| | |--leaf "matt 1234"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.11]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0436]
| | | |--leaf "PsykomanT"
| | | `--leaf "IhlieDaily"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0557]
| | |--leaf "GreGGWar"
| | `--leaf "ZOUILLE95850"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.172]
| |--leaf "timmm"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.107]
| |--leaf "Friedz"
| `--leaf "itrecal"
`--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 53 members at h = 0.998]
|--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 45 members at h = 0.59]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 13 members at h = 0.329]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 7 members at h = 0.152]
| | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.0777]
| | | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0412]
| | | | | |--leaf "Orlafede"
| | | | | `--leaf "miki00"
| | | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.051]
| | | | |--leaf "aurian7"
| | | | `--leaf "MudDobber"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.109]
| | | |--leaf "Albert C"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0787]
| | | |--leaf "hatty"
| | | `--leaf "PJDev"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.160]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.102]
| | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.064]
| | | | |--leaf "topare"
| | | | `--leaf "The Chode"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0781]
| | | |--leaf "cwwyatt"
| | | `--leaf "goJoin.com"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.111]
| | |--leaf "Big Jumblies"
| | `--leaf "Revilo"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 32 members at h = 0.415]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 16 members at h = 0.239]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0864]
| | | |--leaf "Tunzy"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0574]
| | | |--leaf "janLOL"
| | | `--leaf "rodelo"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 13 members at h = 0.175]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 9 members at h = 0.107]
| | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.0864]
| | | | |--leaf "Egle"
| | | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0533]
| | | | |--leaf "riesi1904"
| | | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0332]
| | | | |--leaf "idnera"
| | | | `--leaf "Matt Braun"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 5 members at h = 0.0911]
| | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0432]
| | | | |--leaf "ma1achi"
| | | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.04]
| | | | |--leaf "Who am I ?"
| | | | `--leaf "mrmot"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0566]
| | | |--leaf "potato27"
| | | `--leaf "bsn"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.145]
| | |--leaf "baloo"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0432]
| | |--leaf "Mitsi the cat"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.04]
| | |--leaf "jbw"
| | `--leaf "nyos"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 16 members at h = 0.279]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 10 members at h = 0.171]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0867]
| | | |--leaf "last place"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.06]
| | | |--leaf "fatboy98"
| | | `--leaf "gereffi"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 7 members at h = 0.0942]
| | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.0525]
| | | |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.03]
| | | | |--leaf "Leek Step"
| | | | `--leaf "Takadade"
| | | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0361]
| | | |--leaf "Pat Whalen"
| | | `--leaf "1HAPPYBOY"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.0653]
| | |--leaf "shadolin"
| | `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0436]
| | |--leaf "habit1"
| | `--leaf "Mr.-T"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.255]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.052]
| | |--leaf "MadHat_Sam"
| | `--leaf "eeeekekekeke"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 4 members at h = 0.135]
| |--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.04]
| | |--leaf "Easy A"
| | `--leaf "Art54"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0707]
| |--leaf "ACG"
| `--leaf "Vinter"
`--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 8 members at h = 0.735]
|--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.396]
| |--leaf "smumustang"
| `--leaf "Zete02"
`--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 6 members at h = 0.401]
|--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.159]
| |--leaf "moondust"
| `--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.107]
| |--leaf "ropat"
| `--leaf "arwesome"
`--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 3 members at h = 0.268]
|--leaf "yay"
`--[dendrogram w/ 2 branches and 2 members at h = 0.0927]
|--leaf "gawron"
`--leaf "ImagoDei"