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The Chaos of the Dice -- A Backgammon Hustler's Quest to Gain an Edge
Posted By: Henrik Bukkjaer In Response To: The Chaos of the Dice -- A Backgammon Hustler's Quest to Gain an Edge (Nick Kravitz)
Date: Wednesday, 15 May 2013, at 6:10 a.m.
I think you're close to nitpicking here on a lot of your critique of the article. But your view on position combinations when looking x-ply forward is simply way off. Backgammon branches much more than chess, since the dice yield a whole different cardinality so to speak:
It might be that in chess, the branching is on average 30 legal moves. That's legal moves, which is more or less unimportant, since the majority of these legal moves can be discarded very quickly. You are often left with a lot fewer moves to "go deep with".
In backgammon you can have anything between 1 and 100 legal moves (theoretically 1000+ on doubles in very open positions). But that's for just one outcome on the dice. You have a branching factor of 21 on the dice alone, so even if all your moves are forced (4 men on the bar), you'll end up having 21 different legal moves, NONE of which can be discarded for the deep search, since they are all optimal. So if you narrow it down to something like 4-5 moves to consider for each roll, you still branch a 100 different positions!
To make matters worse, you also have the option of doubling before each move, and the turn of the cube may affect checkerplay, giving even more branches to consider.
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I've been playing both speed chess and speed backgammon at pretty acceptable levels, and I think it's fair to say, that the "ply" you're mentally operating at is much higher for speed chess. In speed backgammon you simply cannot look ahead at all, it's just not feasible, you're playing positions at 0-ply and playing patterns. Only on a few occasions you do a very rough 1-ply kind of thinking, such as counting hit numbers, cover numbers, etc.
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