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Request for BG article authors

Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Tuesday, 17 March 2009, at 5:03 p.m.

We've been here before but it's still going on -- newsletter articles with positions that claim one play is best but which are contradicted by rollouts. So time for a long post plus request.

Newsletters cater to a wide variety of players. Some don't own bots and couldn't care less about what a bot says. In that case the commentary regarding a published position probably doesn't matter. Many of us like to learn from the positions and commentary. And many of us also prefer to determine independently the play we prefer before reading the author's choice (and bot opinion). When we're wrong, we'd like to know if our choice is close or distant. My suggestions stand to help these types of players.

1) Do a long, live-cube rollout with a strong bot (i.e. SW w/ 3-ply precise or GNU-bg with minimum 2-ply checker, 2-ply cube). "Long" means one that either reaches statistical significance for the best play over all others or takes a long time (I mean "days") to find that the differences are small.

2) Run all plays that might be chosen by players. If the bad plays become obvious you can stop their rollouts (easy to do with GNU-bg; requires more human intervention with SW, but still doable and worth the effort).

3) State (preferably quantitative units but at least descriptively) how far back the leading candidates are with respect to the "best" play. You don't have to list distant candidates but the reader needs to know if his choice is close or not. (If not listed, the conclusion should default to "not close".)

4) State the statistical significance of the rollout (preferably joint standard deviations), not simply the number of trials.

All of these recommendations are driven by weaknesses in recent newsletter position reporting. The days of blanket "we can't trust the bots" statements ended years ago. I'd very much like to hear what the players and authors were thinking, but that should be supplemented with accurate rollouts.

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