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Mini-manifesto on evils of PR gammon.

Posted By: MK
Date: Friday, 29 May 2026, at 7:03 a.m.

In Response To: Mini-manifesto on evils of PR gammon. (Bob Koca)

> ... play without worrying about what a bot thinks of it
: or thinking of how to artificially increase decision count.

From 1996 until about 7-8 years ago, I was obsessed with proving that humans could beat the best bots and after playing literally tens of thousands of games over years, I was able to achieve it consistently against all bots.

However, I always said that most people could achieve the same if they tried as hard and also acknowledged that beating the best bots didn't necessarily mean that I could best the best humans.

One thing I concluded was that I couldn't beat the bots by trying to play like the bots, i.e. trying to achieve a low PR, but that I could manage to win despite incurring a huge PR.

Once I discovered this, I repeatedly offered to play against any bot based on my odds of winning retroactively calculated from my PR at the end of the session. Nobody took it. Tim Chow insisted that I should offer equal odds but that would neither allow me to prove that "PR was bullshit" nor to maximize my winnings from such a bet. I even compromized by offering to bet half of my money on winning more than my PR would have predicted and half on winning more than 50% but still nobody took it.

What is also oddly relevant here is that I was using that "artificially increasing decision count" trick not to lower my PR but instead to inflate it so that I would win even more in disproprtion to it.

Them were the good old days... One thing I never got tired of repeating is that human mind can play BG like riding a horse or an ATV being able to steer in any direction vs. bots can only play BG like a train on a single track or at most on paved roads with few ramps. Remember how bandits rob trains in western movies. They know where the tracks go uphill and around the bend, causing the train to slow down. That's where they ambush it. Bots are similarly easy to ambush. You just need to work at it until you figure out how...

MK

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