# The Foraging (Ex-)Bandit [Ruleset & Reflections]

This is a postmortem for a (tiny, ~10min, browser) [game I released earlier this week](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pox6NtZxDvCgKtbfT/inferential-game-the-foraging-ex-bandit). At the time, I thought posting the generation rules for each location would be redundant and spoilery (especially since you could just [look at the code on github](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/H-B-P/Drifting-Bandit/refs/heads/main/index.html)), and that writing a Reflections section would be premature and presumptuous. My opinions and the circumstances have both now changed; hence, this post.

Ruleset
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Horse Hills
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Foraging in Horse Hills gives you a 75% chance of 1d4 food and a 25% chance of 23 + 2d6 + 1d4 food.

A chronologically-and-behaviour-invariant Expected Value of 10 food per forage makes this the default foraging location barring any other opportunities. A forager who spent the entire game here could reasonably expect to conclude with >3500 food stored; consider this a benchmark.

Rat Ruins
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Rat Ruins was avoided by your fellow bandits because they feared a curse; fortunately for you, they were wrong. Rat Ruins starts by providing a large and consistent 20+1d4 food per forage, but since nothing grows there the expected forage amount decreases with each hour; after twelve forages, it’s no longer better than Horse Hills.

Goat Grove
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Goat Grove is in the process of a slow-rolling ecological disaster. It starts by 10 + 1d4 + 1d6 food per forage (for an Expected Value of 15 food per forage), but begins linearly declining on day 7; by day 13, it’s no longer better than Horse Hills.

Rooster Peaks
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Rooster Peaks spends most of the game with a suboptimal 1d6+1d4 yield. However, after Day 43, the roosters come home to roost, changing the algorithm to “9+2d4, *unless* this 1d6 rolls a 1, in which case 0” for an EV of 11.66.

Tiger Forest
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The most edible things in Tiger Forest burn bright enough to see only in the darkness of the night; while it’s suboptimal for most of the day, it beats HH/GG/RP on hours 22 and 23 of each day.

Dog Valley
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Conversely, Dog Valley’s resources are most easily foraged in bright sunlight, which is only available in the valley’s base at midday; it beats HH/GG/RP on hours 12 and 13.

Everywhere Else
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The other six locations are varying levels of suboptimal. They also have no chronological or behavioural effects. Of special note is Dragon Lake, which always produces 0 food because Dragons aren’t real.

Reflections
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This microproject was originally slated to be something much grander (a milliproject at the very least, possibly even a centiproject). I had visions of an endless chain of increasingly hostile and complex roguelike-random contexts through which the protagonist could be chased[^gqnh9vtpkjc], balancing exploration against exploitation and risk against reward until they were finally inevitably caught (at which point the player could try again with a new seed) . . .

. . . and then I built a prototype, and gave it a test-drive, and noticed the central conceit just wasn’t strong enough to support the rest[^1gevnnf5iap]. So, I posted what I had and called it done. Hopefully it provides value as a novelty, and as a vague gesture in the direction of the kind of rationalish inferencey interactive thing I’d like there to be more of.

In retrospect, I think this endeavour was doomed from the start. It *involved* working with tables of numbers, without *requiring* or *developing* relevant skillsets: this gave it a comically small target audience even relative to my other work (sincere thanks to noggin-scratcher, Yonge, and Martin Randall for constituting this audience, and for their thoughtful comments). Next time I set up a VOI/experimentation problem, I think I’ll either 

*   Expand and complicate it to the point where spreadsheets become advisable, and release it as a D&D.Sci scenario,
*   Build it (or, most likely, several *it*s) into an actual capital-g Game where the relevant calculations are some combination of automated/abstracted/absent, or
*   Write a story in which the viewpoint characters solve it.

Feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated.

[^gqnh9vtpkjc]: . . . which would, for those keeping score, have made this a multi-armed non-stationary bandit problem. 

[^1gevnnf5iap]: If you disagree on this point, I enthusiastically encourage you to prove me wrong; all relevant work is public domain, and I’d be more than happy to help by playing playtester.