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BGonline.org Forums
Many will find this ludicrous...
Posted By: Tom Keith In Response To: Many will find this ludicrous... (Michael Petch)
Date: Monday, 10 September 2012, at 1:34 p.m.
Michael, I agree with the gist of what you are saying:
- Most users of mobile bg apps want a quick fun game they can play to use up idle time
- "Fun" means winning more than half the time or, as explained by smcrtorchs, "he keeps playing it again and again just to show his "master skills" to others and to him self. This gives him satisfaction even if others are not there, as he judges himself as an expert in this game during the process."
- Standard bg apps don't provide this satisfaction because bots easily see things that are hard for humans to see, so the bot appears to be luckier than it really is, and nobody likes losing due to bad luck. (This applies to bots of all levels. And it's perhaps even worse with mediocre bots because they have obviously poor strategy but still end up winning because of better tactics.)
However, it seems dishonest to alter the probabilities of the dice unless you make it very clear that's what you're doing. In fact, most the complaints people make of bots "cheating" revolve around the fact that they think the bot has altered the dice in its favor. I know you're proposing altering the dice in the other direction, but if it is wrong to do it one way it doesn't seem right to do it other way either.
Worse, you'd be giving people a wrong sense of dice probabilities. If they ever move to a different backgammon game, or any dice game for that matter, they're probabilities will be all messed up.
Many casual users who like backgammon like it because they can beat their friends at it. If you could create a backgammon opponent that played like a weaker human player, that would satisfy a lot of players.
Weaker humans tend to play safe, at least when it comes to direct shots. They group all indirect shots into one broad category (i.e., they never actually count shots to see what the actual danger is). They occasionally miss hitting their own indirect shots. They are sometimes blinded to a better play because they see another good alternative first. (Eg, failing to see they can make the five point because they immediately see they can make the bar point.) They don't have a good sense of who's ahead in the race and so don't race or not race accordingly. They don't pay enough attention to boardage, so don't play boldly/safely when they should. They are poor at assessing the danger of being blitzed. Similarly, they don't know when or how to conduct a blitz of their own. They are poor at assessing pay-now/pay-later positions so often pay when they don't need to or fail to pay when they should.
Unfortunately, creating a computer program to have these weaknesses while not looking utterly stupid is a hard thing to do.
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