Calculating Probabilities of Winning at Risk

[alexbib]

How could I calculate the probabilities of winning a battle in the game Risk (for example, if I attack 10 guys with 15 of my own)? For those who don't know the game, the attacker throws 3 and takes the best 2 dices, the defender 2, but a defence dice beats an attack dice on the same number. You cannot throw more dices than you have soldiers.

 

[Hurkyl]

-I- would do it by:

(a) writing a short computer program to run through all possible combinations of dice rolls to get the frequency of each possible outcome of each possible dice combination.

(b) Compute, in general, whether it's better or not to always use the most dice available to you.

(c) Write a short program to use the previously calculated frequencies to print to screen a table of probabilities for various attacker/defender combinations.

 

[HallsofIvy]

Grammatical note: there is no such word as "dices".

"Dice" is already plural. The singular is "die".

 

[alexbib]

ok, thanks mates!