As someone who plays pokemon a lot, this reads false. While it's true Electric is a good type because of the only one weakness (Ground attacks) and Ice is cool because it has 4 super advantages (Fly, Dragon, Grass and Ground), it's a terrible type because it also has 4 weaknesses (Fight, Rock, Steel, and Fire).
This analysis just feels wrong. In pure type advantages, sure it's correct. But Pokemon can learn other types of attack besides it's 2 typings! (Infernape, for example, has the typing Fight/Fire. It's weak to Psychic, Water, Flying and Ground. But it has access to moves to get around those weaknesses, meaning that it's typing isn't as bad as this analysis would suggest it is.)
I guess you can say, hmm, that's interesting, but in terms of game play, strategy, and how good a pokemon can be, the typing is usually one of the lesser concerns.
Also, no mention of potential types like Ghost/Normal that have no weakness, or Ghost/Fighting that have complete coverage with their STAB moves. I haven't played in ages, but surely there's more type combinations that are exceedingly OP.
Ghost/Normal does have a weakness. Dark. There is no combination that doesn't have a weakness, anymore. (It used to be Dark/Ghost, but then GameFreak came out with Fairy type, which is super-effective against Dark.)
This is comparing type advantage against all other Pokemon, which isn't representative of actual strength, because most other Pokemon are not viable competitively. What actually matters is type advantage against only the Pokemon with good stats and abilities.
Here's some recent usage stats of top ranking players using the strongest available Pokemon (although lightly restricted by rules designed to prevent excessively boring or luck-dependent matches):
https://www.smogon.com/stats/2018-02/gen7ubers-1760.txt
Ice and electric are very poorly represented. It would be interesting to re-run the algorithm on only the top n from this ranking.
You'd be right if you're only worrying about STAB attacks and pure defense, sure. Admittedly, Bug has a lot of weaknesses and is a lower-tier element in general, realistically what you want to do is have something resistant to Water with a good selection of moves.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] threadThis analysis just feels wrong. In pure type advantages, sure it's correct. But Pokemon can learn other types of attack besides it's 2 typings! (Infernape, for example, has the typing Fight/Fire. It's weak to Psychic, Water, Flying and Ground. But it has access to moves to get around those weaknesses, meaning that it's typing isn't as bad as this analysis would suggest it is.)
I guess you can say, hmm, that's interesting, but in terms of game play, strategy, and how good a pokemon can be, the typing is usually one of the lesser concerns.
Here's some recent usage stats of top ranking players using the strongest available Pokemon (although lightly restricted by rules designed to prevent excessively boring or luck-dependent matches): https://www.smogon.com/stats/2018-02/gen7ubers-1760.txt
Ice and electric are very poorly represented. It would be interesting to re-run the algorithm on only the top n from this ranking.