I keep thinking there's some kind of paper to be written on the subject but given that bg is such a small niche community I'm guessing it won't happen.
I've suggested before that one could try to make a profit by selling insurance to people who are convinced that the dice are rigged. That is, if they are convinced that they are about to throw an anti-joker or that their opponent is about to throw a joker then they can buy insurance against that outcome. Of course no money is involved when someone plays GNU Backgammon on their own computer, but perhaps a feature could be added where you can make "side bets" on the dice. If this were implemented, then I would predict that people would lose money on the side bets but that they would perceive the dice to be fair (that is, they would convince themselves that the bot is more interested in rigging things to win the side bets than it is in rigging things to win the games). If so then this might result in greater customer satisfaction. The other feature that might be interesting is to allow players to receive a handicap, not by having the computer make mistakes, but by having the dice rigged in their favor. That is, instead of a truly random roll, the roll can be slightly biased towards a lucky roll for the player and an unlucky roll for the computer opponent. The nice thing about this feature is that it provides some entertainment value even for "rational" players because they can then think about the best way to exploit the known bias in the dice. Tim _______________________________________________ Bug-gnubg mailing list Bug-gnubg@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnubg
