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Long (rambling) story

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Wednesday, 31 October 2007, at 6:03 p.m.

In Response To: Long (rambling) story (Chuck Bower)

Peter's 1996 comment on Robertie's reaction: http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+104

Other comments:

The fact is that many of Robertie's solutions are after-the-fact. Long propositions were played, and Robertie learned the result and saved the position. In his book, he justifies the solution based on logic or reasoning or breaking down the rolls or emphasizing one very important feature of the position. In doing this, he is showing the reader how one might approach the problem over the board, which is exactly what you want to know to play better backgammon. But the important thing to realize is that the empirical data came first, and the reasoning to point you to the correct play is derivative. -- David Montgomery's, 1996.

In an era when the prevailing wisdom was that hand rollouts of cube actions were useless because of the many thousands of trials one would need to produce a reliable result, Robertie took a different perspective: he happily rolled out interresting positions in 108 game sets, fully understanding that many of his conclusions would be inaccurate, and fully expecting to become a much stronger player for the experience. — Jeremy Bagai, in Classic Backgammon Revisited, March 2001

I have rolled out all these positions with Snowie 3.2 and I can tell you about 25% of these positions have errors. — Brad Davis, September 2002

I would guess that 40% of the solutions are wrong in one way or another. Most are small errors, although a few are big whoppers. -- Matt Cohn-Geier (July 2007), who planned to roll most of the positions out with Gnubg and expected the project to take 3 to 7 months.

Advanced Backgammon Rollouts:

Hardy Heubener at http://www.hardyhuebener.de/engl/roberties_irrtuemer.html identifies 39 of the 400 problems as errors based on "rollouts with GNU Backgammon, version 0.14.3 (2005). 1296 rollouts, 0-ply, non-truncated, cubeless."

For a long relevant discussion, see the rec.games.backgammon thread entitled "opening toughie" dated January 1997 with contributions from Brian Sheppard, Mark Damish, Stephen Turner, Chuck Bower, Ron Karr, Fredrik Dahl, Alexander Nitschke, Fredrik Dahl and David Montgomery.

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