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BGonline.org Forums
Backgammon on the airplane
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Tuesday, 8 September 2009, at 5:24 p.m.
I flew overseas on Continental Airlines recently and each seat had a console with various entertainment options, including a backgammon game. It played atrociously and would not normally be worth commenting on, except that after a while I started to get the impression that it was deliberately trying to lose. There were numerous checker plays that seemed very hard to explain otherwise (passing up obvious hits, for example).
More interestingly, I also got the impression that even the dice were rigged to help the player win. For example, I tried scattering blots all over the board to make it almost impossible for the computer not to hit. Often, it still managed not to hit. When I did finally force it to hit me multiple times, it obligingly gave me doubles to enter them all against a four-point board.
(I should add, though, that the program was also not trying as hard as possible to lose, since when I made a concerted effort to lose, I "succeeded" without too much difficulty.)
It might be amusing to record some of these games and do some post-mortem analysis to see how "lucky" the dice are. What checker-play strategy would be best if my goal is to accumulate evidence that the program is blatantly rigging the dice in my favor? Is my blotfest strategy good or is there something better?
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