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BGonline.org Forums
Servers Dice and Such
Posted By: W Womack In Response To: Servers Dice and Such (Timothy Chow)
Date: Monday, 2 August 2010, at 12:42 a.m.
Is there really a large cohort of people who will swing one way or the other on the basis of some statistical test?
I doubt there are many at all that care about the statistics, but I find the whole question interesting. After SHG changed there dice (at least in some rooms) there were a lot of people that were convinced that the numbers of doubles were wrong -- and as much as said they did not care what the statistics showed they "knew" the dice were wrong. So that last part is probably more of theoretical interest than practical interest.
XG gives a pretty good overview of dice, looking at the frequency of all possible rolls as well as stats about entering from the bar. I think that is pretty much the practical limit unless you develop some sort of special test, just because you would need so much data to look at particular situations. For example I always shake might head when my opponent is on the bar and I have all but the one point and they roll a 61 to spring that checker. It feels like it happens why more than it should -- but I would be really shocked if it actually does as it is just one of those events that stands out. But to get enough of a sample to make a valid statistical conclusion about that you would need tens of thousands of such positions, and those would be hard to collect from a single persons matches, even if they played a lot.
We all have our little quirks and areas of interest, and one that I find fascinating are the dice stats, or better peoples reaction to the dice stats. It amazes me that people will swear up and down that they "know" the dice are "bad" what will refuse to put forward any data in support of that. After the doubles change on SHG I continually challenged people that were claiming the doubles were one sided, or that their opponent was frequently getting multiple doubles in a row to send me match logs. I had some people that would email me and tell me that they were absolutely positive that the dice were bad because they had been playing backgammon live for 20 years and real dice never act like the SHG dice -- yet they would turn around and tell me they never saved match logs. Despite all the claims of too many and/or one sided doubles no one ever sent me a single match log, much less one that had all those doubles.
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