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BGonline.org Forums
Which play is better based upon rollouts
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Which play is better based upon rollouts (Daniel Murphy)
Date: Monday, 26 April 2010, at 11:08 p.m.
Daniel, thanks for your insightful comments. Let me just say that my main point is to be careful not to overestimate our understanding of this game. Looking at the history of various board games, I've noticed that the best players almost always overestimate how well they understand the game, until one gets very close to the point when the game really is mathematically solved. Every time there's a significant advance, the experts are startled, and then they say, "Well, we didn't really understand the game before, but now we really understand it!" It's clear that backgammon is a long way from being mathematically solved in the sense that checkers or six-piece chess has been solved. So I think that there is plenty of potential for noticeable shifts. We may feel now that it's bad to steer towards backgames, and there is undoubtedly some truth to that rule of thumb, but I really don't think we can rule out the possibility that steering towards backgames is right much more often than we currently think it is. We're just not good enough at assessing how well a perfect player can maintain his timing in complex positions.
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