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BGonline.org Forums
Backgammon on the airplane
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Backgammon on the airplane (Timothy Chow)
Date: Tuesday, 18 September 2012, at 2:45 p.m.
A few years ago, I wrote:
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. [...] More interestingly, I also got the impression that even the dice were rigged to help the player win. [...] It might be amusing to record some of these games and do some post-mortem analysis to see how "lucky" the dice are.
I just flew recently on the same airline (now called United Airlines) and decided to record three games on the "hard" level. This time, I played "normally" for the most part, figuring that that would be a good starting point for study. Although the computer still played atrociously, I didn't sense anything particularly weird about the dice. When I got home, I entered the games into GNU and XG. Ideally, I would have entered and analyzed them as cubeless games, but this doesn't seem to be an option, so as an approximation I treated them as DMP games. GNU's luck rating for both sides was "none" for all three games. XG gave the computer PR ratings of about 86, 39, and 88 respectively.
Next time I might try the blotfest strategy to see if I can provoke strange dice.
Of course, the inflight entertainment software might have changed in the interim, but I kind of doubt it. I'm not sure how to find out more about who created the program originally.
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