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BGonline.org Forums
Art Benjamin's new approach to racing cubes
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 10 June 2023, at 12:24 p.m.
This will not be news to faithful readers of PrimeTime, but Art Benjamin (and his collaborators) have come up with a new approach to racing cubes in short races. The executive summary is that he proposes taking both the expected value (that is, EPC) and the variance of the number of rolls needed to bear off. Of course, there already exists a traditional distinction between "pippish" and "rollish" positions, which may be interpreted as a first step toward taking variance into account, but Art's claim is that splitting into four categories (pippish, almost pippish, almost rollish, rollish) then you can arrive at extremely accurate cube actions. Of course, you also need to get really good at estimating EPC, but he has tricks for that too. Most of the details are explained in the Fall 2022 issue of PrimeTime.
PrimeTime articles are premium content, but an introduction to Art's ideas is given in the following video (intended for an audience of mathematicians rather than an audience of backgammon players):
He also pointed me to a website for practicing EPC estimation. I think this site was created by Hal Heinrich.
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