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Disagree with Stick's Book Review

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 11 December 2010, at 7:41 p.m.

In Response To: Disagree with Stick's Book Review (Daniel Murphy)

Most of what Daniel and Rich say I agree with, with the exception of the issue that provoked this subthread, namely whether Xavier's choice of definition of "world class" was savvy salesmanship or whether he was "forced" to define it that way because of Snowie. I still maintain that it was a shrewd decision on his part, and hardly inevitable. GNU Backgammon illustrates that Snowie's definitions do not in any way compel programmers of other bots to follow suit. Xavier took pains to sell "PR" as something new. The fact that PR is sort of close to ER numerically and sort of close to GNU's system definitionally just proves my point: Even though PR is arguably not really new, Xavier has successfully sold it as being the new standard because he spun it right. Similarly, just like the GNU team, Xavier was free to choose a different definition of "world class" and argue that his new standard was better. GNU's standards were widely regarded as being too strict so Xavier shrewdly chose to dial back to something closer to Snowie's definition. Flattering the customer always pays off in the end.

Daniel Murphy wrote:

don't know of any place at all where it's demonstrated that the XG formula is superior to the Gnubg formula

Of course not. There can't possibly be such a demonstration. It's all marketing, not science.

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