Re: [Bug-gnubg] Possible small UI simplification

[Massimiliano Maini]

Disclaimer: I've lost my interest in backgammon a long ago, so ...

On 22 August 2015 at 00:12, Philippe Michel <address@hidden> wrote:

If noise is added to the evaluations GNU Backgammon will take a Box Müller transform of a point in the unit circle and add to each possible outcome probability. This means that the addition is random, but distributed so that it's more likely to have an noise addition close to zero than a noise addition close to the limit. The noise addition is limited to the number you put into the noise field in the dialog box.

If you check the box Deterministic noise, the noise added to each evaluation will be based on a sum of the bytes in the hash of the board position, which (by the central limit theorem) should have a normal distribution. In that way you will always have that same noise amount to a position, since the noise added to the evaluation is only depending on the position itself.

Of the two, I think the non-det one is the one I'd keep: at any rate it's the one closer to my idea of noise.

I may see why a det-noise can be handy, but as the non-det noise actually uses gnubg RNG, it's not really non-det: if needed, you can make it (kind of) det giving it its own RNG instance with a seed, no ?

MaX.