> Hi Max, > I was not playing against the automated bot. > I was playing human against human, and I was playing both players.
I would think that playing equally well for both sides is probably quite difficult, especially when you have already formed an opinion about what you expect to see. "Confirmation bias" is a well-known problem afflicting many areas of research far more important than backgammon. Have you run a gnubg analysis on your 10 matches, and noted the error rates and luck rates for both sides? Welcome to gnubg backgammon. I hope it gives you much enjoyment and helps you improve your game. The developers would welcome genuine evidence of any bugs in gnubg, so that they can correct them. However, they will expect high standards of proof. Almost every backgammon bot and online server regularly gets accused of manipulating the dice in favour of the opponent, or other forms of cheating, so this is déjà vu for them. Many of the best players in the world use the bots to help them study, and none of them have noticed anything amiss, so I'm sure you can appreciate that the developers will treat the first impressions of an unknown person with a degree of scepticism. To my knowledge, only one bug has ever been found, in a minor online server, which was found to be generating too few doubles. When they corrected the error, there were even more complaints that the dice were unrealistic! I can't remember where I read this, so I can't give you a link to it, I'm afraid. In the case of gnubg, the code is open source, so anyone can read it, compile it, and even change it to suit themselves. There have been a large number of developers over the years (the original ones are no longer involved), and they are confident that the random number generator is correct. I'm not one of them, but I have read much of the code. I can find no evidence that the rng looks at the board position or who is on roll. I'm certain that the move generator only looks at the board position, not at the upcoming dice sequence. Regards, Ian Shaw _______________________________________________ Bug-gnubg mailing list Bug-gnubg@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnubg
