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BGonline.org Forums
Will we ever see a genuine backgammon prodigy? (Long)
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Will we ever see a genuine backgammon prodigy? (Long) (ah_clem)
Date: Tuesday, 29 July 2014, at 5:14 p.m.
ah_clem wrote:
It takes experience, and that's not really something that's in the realm of what makes a prodigy.
This might be just a semantic point.
It sounds like your definition of a prodigy is a kid who manages to reach an astounding level of achievement without the benefit of any outside help from books or teachers. In this sense, I'm not sure that there are any true prodigies in chess or math either. I think you may be underestimating the degree to which everyone in those fields stands on the shoulders of giants. Suppose, for instance, that we wouldn't consider a child to be a math prodigy unless he or she re-invented the concept of "zero" without any prompting. Given how long it took civilization to invent zero, I don't think we would have any math prodigies to speak of. Similarly, I don't think that there would be any musical prodigies if you were disqualified as soon as you heard any music composed by someone else.
It seems to me that a more realistic notion of a prodigy is someone who reaches a very high level of achievement at an extraordinarily young age. Then I don't see any reason why we couldn't have a backgammon prodigy. The prodigy would of course need access to a bot, just as (for example) musical prodigies need access to musical instruments.
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