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BG Buddy speedgammon demo
Posted By: Albert Steg In Response To: BG Buddy speedgammon demo (Phil Simborg)
Date: Saturday, 18 March 2017, at 3:35 a.m.
There's a lot of false equivalency going on in this argument.
In using dice, it's usual protocol that the owner of the dice offers his opponent the choice of dice, often among 4 or 6 individual dice. So not is more difficult for the owner of weighted dice to benefit from them. The current, and increasingly popular, convention of using a single pair of dice between the two players further limits the possibility of unfairness.
The potential for electronic devices to be 'gaffed' in some way prejudicial to the owner of the device are virtually unlimited. A device could have a wireless backdoor controlled by a spectator who manipulates a device in his pocket to influence rolls in any way imaginable. This sort of thing is very well within the bounds of the extravagances to which people have gone to cheat at various money games in casinos -- and backgammon -- over time.
I'm not absolutely opposed to the use of electronic dice, though I will express a preference to the aesthetic quality of dice rolling -- but when people try to dismiss concerns over electronic cheating by equating it with the risk of mechanical dice cheating, they just lose me completely. Especially when they cannot even acknowledge the meaning of "precision dice" and insist that they are "not random."
In recent weeks there have been some who pointed toward a system where each player would provide some sort of 'electronic key' which would be mated with an opponent's key in some third-party server and produce a demonstrably impartial dice roll. This sort of tech is very far beyond me (and, I would think, most players) yet it at least attempts to address a problem that is real, or at least felt to be real, which amounts to the same thing in practical terms. If some such system won the conviction of the brightest minds in this field, I would go along, though perhaps with an uneasy anticipation of waking up one morning to read about a big electronic dice rolling scam being exposed in my favorite game. (But who would have dreamed anyone would go to such lengths to cheat at a mere game of dice?)
But going along with the idea that the risks of dice cheating with physical dice vs. electronic dice are equivalent? Not even close. Not even if the person encouraging me to think so were the most trusted, selfless, altruistic person in the game.
There are a lot of innovations / alterations in play going on these days -- baffle boxes, single-pair-of-dice, flat dice rules, legal rules, clock conventions. Some are controversial, some less so. When you get to the dice, you're getting to the essence of people's sense of fairness in the game, and electronic dice are a black box that you're asking people to rely on. This is a place we should tread carefully, because a suspicion of malfeasance will much more readily come to mind with electronic dice than with physical dice, even if everything is on the level. You're going to need more than "they can cheat with real dice too" to overcome the feeling that something might be fishy with electronic dice. So solve that problem!
Albert
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