Creamsteak said:No, your missing the elegance of a simpler program design. You don't need to run 6^24 binary comparisons to check each total, you need to run 15^6 by simplifying the algorithm.
OK, agreed, although to nitpick that should be 16^6. (Fenceposts again.)
Creamsteak said:And taking just 1 ability scores average points value for all results will not yield you the results for two reasons. 1) You can't take criteria like "one ability must be greater than 13" into consideration,
That was exactly what I was referring to above when I wrote
orsal said:If you get into a "reroll the whole character if you don't get something at least this good overall" formula, it becomes more complicated, because you can't consider each of the six attributes in isolation anymore.
My spreadsheet as it stands does not take that rule into effect. I could fix it to throw out characters with no score at least 14 (takes a little thinking, if you want I'll explain how and why it works, but mathematics is already boring most of our readers, and this would only make it worse), but I don't think I could fix it to require a net +1 or higher. However, if scores are rolled with 4d6, and the character is guaranteed at least one +2, it is very unlikely that the sum of the ability modifiers will be 0 or less, so that won't alter the average very much.
Creamsteak said:and 2) Since point buy is non-differential, you can't break it down into a linear equation that breaks up evenly, so since 18s and 17s are worth more than 14s and 9s, you get a total which is related to the most common values 12-14 that will dominate the single instance, but not all instances that exist for 6 arrays.
That doesn't matter. So long as I compute the average of the point buy counts, rather than the ability scores, of the individual abilities, I'll get the average of the sum of the point buy counts when I multiply by six. The reason is this: if you have any number of random variables (let's say six, call them S, D, C, I, W, X), the expected value (i.e. mean average) of (S+D+C+I+W+X) is the sum of the individual expected values. That's a theorem from probability theory.