Re: [Bug-gnubg] random dice generator? hahahaaa

[Rich Heimlich]

The only times it came up back in my day was when a bug exposed it. People rarely ever knew it. AI cheats today in simpler ways that people accept. Turning a real time strategy game to "expert" might mean it can make choices faster than you or it has more hidden health for its units or it "sees" farther. 

Company of Heroes did this for its entire history. If you made certain moves in your base the AI would counter with its own changes even though their units shouldn't have a clue what you were doing and no one thought of this as cheating. 

AI is really tough to do right in some situations. Take Scrabble. Most iterations of it use a simple approach to skill levels. The higher you turn it up the longer the words it will use under the thinking that "cat" is easier than "androgynous". While that's true, "politician" is also more basic than "xi" which few people other than advanced Scrabble players know. Oops. 

We actually helped develop one of the few iterations that went beyond that approach. It required us to literally rate and weight every single word in the Scrabble dictionary. It took months to do. I'll never forget it, but the results were amazing. However, the next publisher that got the rights went right back to the old way because it was cheaper and faster. 

On Aug 26, 2017 2:50 AM, "Øystein Schønning-Johansen" <address@hidden> wrote:

I really don't think Tim is suggesting this scheme, and I think he absolutely understands flaws of the scheme.

Now the interesting part: How can you construct a scientific test to prove (or falsify) the postulate that a software uses such scheme?

-Øystein

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 10:44 PM, Guido Flohr <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> Along these lines, a friend of mine who also works in the gaming industry said that they often use dice that are generated in something like the following fashion: The computer internally creates a 36-card deck, each with one of the 36 possible dice rolls.  Then it deals out 18 cards from this deck to get 18 dice rolls.  Then it reshuffles and starts over to get the next 18 rolls.

What you describe is a completely biased scheme. Your friend’s company maybe implemented it in order to avoid trolls complaining about them cheating?

>
> With this scheme, you never get (for example) three double 6's in a row.  Rarely does anyone notice anything strange about the dice, and if people are not told what is going on, there are typically far fewer complaints about the dice.

A set of truly random real-world dice may produce subsequent double sixes until the heat death of the universe.  This is called randomness.  Randomness has no memory, remember?

>
> I mentioned this concept on BGOnline once (a "hardcore" BG community) and predictably, they hated it.  So that's another piece of evidence to support what Rich Heimlich said.

They predictably disapproved your improvements, yes.  This is called rationalism, also know as common sense.

Others have already mentioned it: You can run gnubg with your own personally, manually rolled dice from your own backgammon set.  Try it out!

<spoiler-alert>You will continue losing!</spoiler-alert>

Tim, it’s 2017, and considering the state of the art of hard- and software it is absolutely normal that artificial intelligence beats human intelligence in games like backgammon or chess on a more than regular basis.  If you think that gnubg has to cheat for beating you, then become a professional backgammon player and be rich!

<spoiler-alert>You will be broke in no time at all!</spoiler-alert>

If you you are positive that gnubg cheats, why not install another software and troll their support forum for a change?

Regards!
—
Oh, Lord, please let it rain brains!

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