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BGonline.org Forums
Creativity
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: MCG! (MishyPoo)
Date: Thursday, 12 February 2015, at 9:58 p.m.
I found the following exchange particularly interesting:
marcozarco: When I was a beginner, I though of backgammon as a very creative game, where I was trying to steer the game in a particular way. Then as I learned more from reading a bunch of books and playing tons of matches with Snowie, I started thinking it as more as a challenge to analyze the current position and avoid making mistakes. And unfortunately, it took a little bit of joy away from the game when I realized that I wasn't making creative moves, but rather just a bunch of provably bad blunders. (It probably doesn't help that I spend most of my life writing and debugging software.) My wife would see my wrinkled brow and ask me "Is Snowie kicking your ass again?". Any advice on how to think of improving as something other than reducing mistakes? Or is that just the nature of the beast?
MCG: I think that backgammon is a creative game. If you just try to apply rules of thumb and run through a list of heuristics, there is a ceiling on how well you can play. If you can think about unfamiliar situations critically and creatively, you can apply that skillset to a wide range of positions.
My view is that improving does ultimately come down to reducing mistakes, but that the main way to reduce mistakes is to develop a better general understanding of the game. Certainly, we sometimes make crass mistakes such as missing an obvious hit or miscounting pips or miscalculating a takepoint. But many errors arise from not understanding what's going on in a position. So I agree with what I think MCG is saying, that developing your own understanding of the game is a creative process.
However, if marcozarco thinks that being "creative" means that having the freedom to steer the game one way or another, then it does seem that backgammon has relatively limited scope for creativity. Certainly, the attitude of some players, that if the computer says that if Play A edges out Play B by 0.001 then Play A is "right" and Play B is "wrong" leaves essentially no room for creativity of this type. While I think this attitude is misguided, I do think that it's the exception rather than the rule that you will have the opportunity to, say, steer towards a particular type of game that you think will cause your opponent difficulties, without making gross blunders along the way. Typically, I think, the dice dictate what you have to do and you just have to follow orders.
Does anybody have a different view?
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