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BGonline.org Forums
Something really, really new?
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Colorless Counting--A clever concept (Phil Simborg)
Date: Thursday, 27 December 2012, at 1:21 a.m.
Again, if you mean a single conceptual heuristic that makes a dramatic difference to your skill level, then I think the answer is no.
There are certain tradeoffs that we now weight rather differently. We are more finely attuned to win/gammon tradeoffs, we run the back checker more often, we understand distraction plays better, etc. But none of the concepts involved is strictly speaking really new. It's just that our perception of the equilibrium point between competing factors has shifted.
The one area where I think a major conceptual advance could still occur, but hasn't yet, is recube vig. Right now, recube vig is for the most part just some mysterious number that we pull out of a hat. We don't have a strong grasp of how recube vig varies with position, nor do we have a strong quantitative grasp of the frequency with which the taker sends the cube back or the frequency with which the recube is accepted or rejected. This is somewhat akin to the past where some mysterious percentage was used as "the gammon rate" and people had a poor quantitative grasp of how the gammon rate varied according to position.
This could potentially be remedied if the bots were programmed to provide the right kind of information. They don't right now, because the BG community doesn't really care. I believe that a better understanding of recube vig would significantly change the way we think about and analyze certain decisions, but in the end, the effect on one's skill will be small, so I can see why there is limited interest in pursuing this direction.
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