Today I wanted to give You a cool snippet showing the power of Scala’s Collections. This short and beautiful piece counts odds of throwing out a sum of 2 dices ( 6 - sided )

The result is a list of tuples:

List((7,6), (6,5), (8,5), (5,4), (9,4), (10,3), (4,3), (3,2), (11,2), (2,1), (12,1))


Where first number indicates the sum and the seconds number is the chance (x / 36)

If You want an in-depth explanation we’ll do it step by step. So let’s break it down

1.

(1 to 6)


Is a syntactic sugar for Range(1,7) which creates an inclusive sequence from 1 to 6

2.

.flatMap applies to every element of the list flattening the result

3.

map { a + _ }


is a big syntactic sugar for

map { b => a + b}


4.

Then We’ve got a groupBy method which with identity which is a shortcut for a => a (it’s not really shorter but it feels much more intuitive)

5.

Now we’ve got a Map of a Vectors (Arrays) in which we iterate through values ( Array of the same values ). Because all of the values are the same we can change the value just to a length of the Array.

6

And this is actually the exercise done. Now for the sake of clarification I sort the results by their chance from highest to lowest. To do that - because now we’ve got a map of ( sum -> chance ) - we change it to a list of tuples with toList All we do then is sort by very cool syntactic sugar notation ( -_._2 ) which is a shorter way of writing

{ a => return -a._2 }


And _2 is a second value of tuple ( analogically _1 is for first, _3 for third etc)

And this is how You can solve complex statistics task in a fast and concise quasi one-liner.

Cheers