The cat salesman IV

Now, regarding travel… How and where would you travel to get from Gwynedd to Dyfed and vice versa? What would be the best path?

The travelers guide

Take a look at the following image:

Map of wales

I’ll let you ponder for a minute what the optimal path would be, and then I’ll show you… Okay, have you pondered? Now I’ll show you the optimal path to lug your carriage and 16 geese from Gwynedd to Dyfed, here it is:

The path

There are mountains everywhere, and you can’t scale mountains with a carriage and 16 geese/8 cats! You should therefore try to stick to the coast and then later go trough an opening in the mountains. It’s kind of important to consider that… I don’t know, there’s like a 20% chance you die. Yes, like all kingdoms in the 10th century, Wales was incredibly dangerous and I can’t imagine that the landscape of the time was all that pleasant.

The pillagers

Yeah… I wish I had a solution to the pillagers ravaging the countryside between Gwynedd and Dyfed, but I don’t really do. The best way to avoid pillagers would be equipping yourself with a sword or a bow, unfortunately adding more ceiniogs to starting investment.

The 90%

90% of the time while travelling you’re either going to die or you’re going to lose a bunch of stuff, so basically “90% of cat salesmen get brutally mutilated by pillagers on the countryside of Wales before they hit it big!”. Huh. I think we need to start reconsidering our… MATH CALCULATIONS! Did you think I was going to give up on my dream as a cat salesman? No, but our math calculations are now flawed.

Math

Uhh, I’m not going to calculate the chance of dying because… You never really know! You could say there’s a P(1) chance of any chance being the correct chance, therefore making any chance P(1) = P(x). No, the real thing we need to reform is the value of 1 ce/ca – which I’m going to be calling a ceca (see-sey) from here on out because it’s cooler (and I’m very cool) –, because you might lose a few geese and cats along the way. Now, we could try to find different times people took our route and if they got robbed, but we could also be lazy and make an educated guess.

Now, we’re going to be calculating a chance of getting killed/stolen per ride and then just calculate that. But how? Well, I’m actually just going to guess right here, let’s say there’s a P(1) = 40% chance (or risk? In my language we say risk when the chance is bad, but not sure if it’s like that in English) of a goose or cat getting removed – “removed” being a common word for killed or stolen – so we can say that per carriage ride, our animal storage (x), on average, will be:

(1 - P(1)) * x
(1 - 0.4) * x
0.6 * x

So, for example, if our animal storage is 10, we will have 6 animals left in our storage. This 40% thing is a very exaggerated estimate, as it was probably much less than that, but I don’t want to ruin your business by underestimating the pillagers on the Wales countryside.

Yeah, enjoy your business, I guess.

Next chapter: The cat salesman V

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