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Late April Fools' Day...

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 23 May 2012, at 3:14 p.m.

In Response To: Late April Fools' Day... (Michael Petch)

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I think that your Revolutions b and c are more within reach than Revolution a.

As long as we insist on sticking to the standard initial position, I agree that progress is likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary. Opening theory could change, but not to the extent that we'd change the way we play an opening 31. If we look at other games such as chess, Othello, or 8x8 checkers where certain complex positions have been mathematically solved, we find that there are indeed some surprises, but not of the same order of magnitude as playing an opening 31 differently.

However, suppose we were to change backgammon as follows. The first player is allowed to set up an arbitrary position as a starting position. The second player then gets to choose which side to play. This is still a perfectly fair game, because the first player could always choose a symmetrical position. However, in this variant, strong humans can easily blow the current bots out of the water by setting up a known tough position. I think this would be a very interesting variant of backgammon and there's still room for "revolutionary progress" on it.

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