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useless problem?

Posted By: Jason Lee
Date: Friday, 18 December 2009, at 8:00 p.m.

In Response To: useless problem? (Klaus Evers)

But then I looked at the RO and was disappointed: The difference is pretty tiny.

So with all the good reasons for slotting and all the good reasons for hitting, for any practical, real life conclusions and for improving my game I learned nothing here. All I learned is that you can have good reasons for two almost even choices.

At ANY stage in a match, I don't think 0.016 is a tiny difference. Even if you really think that's small, backgammon can be about squeezing out little bits of equity here and there. You make lots of these decisions, and if you make them correctly, you have a much bigger chance of winning.

Anyway, ask any of the big guns here, and I promise you that every last one of them will tell you that 0.016 is not tiny.

So why posting such a play at all? It would be much more enlightening if the players here would post problems that are tough, but then have a clearly best play. THEN I could learn something useful from the good arguments that favor the right move.

First of all, you're assuming that I did a rollout, saw the equity difference, and decided it was a good problem. That's not what happened. I saw an interesting position that I thought would generate good discussion and lead me to learn something.

Let's say the plays had rolled out to identical equity. I still can learn something. When strong players post their analyses, often what I find interesting isn't really their conclusions, but the METHODS by which they reach those conclusions.

As a math professor, I preach this concept every day to my students. I do not care so much what the answer is -- I care how you GOT to the answer. And, the primary goal of a student when faced with a math problem isn't for them to solve the problem -- it's to be able to clearly articulate what they know... hopefully solving the problem along the way.

Frankly, no matter what the rollout had said, I disagree that this was in ANY way a useless problem.

JLee

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