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BGonline.org Forums
Meaning of "cubeless" in gnubg
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Tuesday, 15 September 2009, at 3:25 a.m.
This message theoretically belongs in the GNU/Snowie/XG Cubeful/Cubeless/Live Cube Rollouts thread but I think it's interesting enough to warrant posting at the top.
Christian Anthon answered Michael Depreli's question about the meaning of gnubg's "cubeless" numbers as follows:
The game is played cubeful and truncated at double-pass. At this point the game is evaluated and the appropriate values are added to the cubeless numbers. Other truncation points are possible and handled the same way. If a game is played to the end it is added to the cubeless values. Add luck reduction to that and things get a bit muddy.
If I understand this correctly, this means in particular that the "cubeless" numbers are based on cubeful checker-play. It follows that the "cubeless" numbers are not reliable approximations to the equity of a cubeless backgammon game played by optimal players.
So what is this "cubeless" number good for? Come to think of it, what good are cubeless numbers in Snowie's sense, now that nobody plays backgammon without a cube any more? Does Snowie compute it just for Janowski's sake, so to speak?
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