[Bug-gnubg] Some questions & comment about contacting me

[Thomas Hauk]

Sorry Achim, I missed your question:

> Just one question: What is this thesis for?

mainly because I do not subscribe to the gnubg mailing list, just because 
there's too much discussion about stuff that isn't code-related for me to 
really care about. That doesn't mean I don't want to answer your questions 
(although you did mention something contrary to that to my supervisors in 
Graz!), just that you'll have to remember to CC: me at 
<address@hidden> so I can respond. 8)

My thesis is investigating an improvement to expectimax search (for game 
trees that include chance nodes, such as dice rolls, or dealing cards) 
called *-minimax, developed by Bruce Ballard in 1983. The main focus was 
on backgammon, since relatively little improvement has been done to 
backgammon search, compared to evaluation functions (TD-trained NNs) for 
example.

At this point we haven't seen a great deal of improvement in deep search 
-- perhaps no improvement, really -- but I am continuing my work 
nonetheless.

Have any of you done any benchmarking, playing gnubg versus itself, using 
different ply settings? Say, gnubg at 0-ply versus gnubg at 1-ply or 
2-ply? Have you seen statistically significant differences?

I am running DMP games right now, as my search algorithms do not yet 
handle the cube. Any thoughts on that?

-- 
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use 
regular expressions."  Now they have two problems.
  --Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs