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BGonline.org Forums
GNU-Status ?
Posted By: Michael Petch In Response To: GNU-Status ? (Seth)
Date: Tuesday, 6 August 2013, at 1:51 a.m.
If you are running Windows XP on older processors (Which you are), then the version you are using (1.01.003) runs perfectly fine.
If you are referring to the even/odd ply effect as mentioned here: http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Keith/DepreliBotComparison/
And with regards to this comment: "In Gnu Backgammon, you should not use 3-ply evaluation for cube decisions. Always use even ply, either 2-ply or 4-ply." Then this issue has been lessened greatly based on newer data that was not available when that article was written. That article was last updated last year prior to GNUBG getting a new neural net configuration.
3-ply cube decisions according to new Depreli data may suggest that this statement may be less relevant with 1.0+ versions of GNUBG. That page will likely be updated when the next complete study is done. Xavier, Frank Berger, Michael Depreli and I have been doing some work the past number of months to prepare for the next study. Many of us are working on other high priority things, so I would expect the next study would be in 2014 or later. This is just a personal observation based on correspondences.
V1.0x releases are not mention on the GNUBG site as the first publicly advertised one will be 1.02.000 .
If you are going to ask when 1.02.000 will be created, then the answer it has already been produced. Versions for all Apple OS/X versions from 10.4 and later (Intel and PPC) will be available, as well as MS Windows.
If you ask "When will 1.02.000 appear officially on gnubg.org ?" the answer will be about 95% chance that it will be this week.
If you ask "On XP with an older processor, should I upgrade to 1.02.000 when it is released", the answer would be "You can upgrade but you won't observe any difference".
The people that will be affected by using 1.02.000 are those using MS Windows 7 and 8. MS Windows 8 had issues after installation. Users of MS Windows 7 & 8 who have new processors with AVX support will observe that the AVX code is no longer experimental. The speed gain for AVX is about 6% (this is an estimate) over SSE2. In 1.01.003 AVX code was much slower than SSE2. Computers prior to 2011 don't support AVX so in your case it won't matter.
This is for more technical people - I have been waiting for downstream maintainers of many Linux distributions to start migrating to 1.0x . Debian has come on board and released 1.01.003 into testing (Thanks to Russ Allbery). Arch Linux based distros are also making 1.01.003 available. Since GNUBG is available on so many platforms, it often takes time for our GNUBG releases to trickle down to end users. There are still a large number of users who choose GNU Backgammon as their bot of choice on those non-MS Windows platforms.
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