Forum Archive : Miscellaneous

Calculation versus instinct From:   Kit Woolsey Address:   kwoolsey@netcom.com Date:   19 January 1998 Subject:   Re: Backgammon Then and Now... Forum:   rec.games.backgammon Google:   kwoolseyEn0sDC.LG4@netcom.com Dave Hart wrote: > The most popular BG books today, "How To Play Tournament Backgammon", > "New Ideas in Backgammon" and "Can A Fish Taste Twice as Good?" > are based on serious mathematical analysis, "Tournament" incorporating > Hal Henrich's database to create Kit Woolsey's popular equity table, > "New Ideas" based on Jellyfish rollouts and "Fish" based on equity > tables. All leading me to the conclusion that "the mathematical way > is the right way". Thanks for the plug. However, I disagree with your conclusion. I believe that for the most part backgammon cannot be attacked "mathematically", and those players who attempt to quantify everything in some way or other tend to lose the forest through the trees and make more bad plays than those players who play by their gut instinct. It is true that there is some math in match equity analysis. However the most important figure, namely your game-winning (or gammon winning or losing) chances cannot be mathematically calculated except for a few simple end-game positions. There are simply too many variables. All we can do is look at the position, take into account all the factors, weight them as best we can, and come up with our best guess. Note that this is exactly what the neural nets do -- only their weightings are often better than ours. For play decisions, what good would it do to memorize a bunch of rolled out positions? You probably aren't going to see that exact position in your lifetime. What is important from these positions is the priorities which are involved. The rollouts, if they are accurate, can tell us where our estimates of the priorities for a type of position may be in error, so if see a similar sort of position in the future we can adjust our personal weights and priorities and come up with a better conclusion. This is what Hal and I tried to emphasize in our book -- not the positions themselves, but the reasons which made the best move the winner. In actual play, I do very little calculating. Most of my plays are made on my feel for the position, based on priorities and weights which I have developed from analyzing similar positions. I believe this is true for most of the top players. Kit   Did you find the information in this article useful?           Do you have any comments you'd like to add?

 

Miscellaneous

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Backgammon versus poker  (Peter Hallberg, June 2006) 

Backgammon's popularity  (Anon+, Sept 2003) 

Board orientation  (Daniel Murphy, Mar 1999) 

Calculation versus instinct  (Kit Woolsey, Jan 1998) 

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Giants of Backgammon list  (Raccoon+, Mar 2006) 

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Handicapping--Pass or pick a roll  (Michael J. Zehr, Dec 1997) 

Handicapping--Rerolling 5-4  (Mary Hickey, Feb 2004) 

How bots rate you  (Phil Simborg, Mar 2010) 

Initiatives by local clubs  (Raccoon, Mar 2006) 

Is online gambling legal in the U.S.?  (Chuck Bower+, June 2006) 

Maximizing earnings  (Stanley E. Richards+, Oct 2005) 

Money management  (Carly Robson+, Jan 2009) 

Money management  (Gnoh Mon+, July 2004) 

Money management  (Adam Stocks, Jan 2003) 

Money management and the Kelly Criterion  (Stuart Thomson+, June 1999) 

Notation  (Dean Gay, Feb 2000) 

Notation  (Kit Woolsey, July 1995) 

Position cards  (Francois Hochede, Jan 2004) 

Posted diagrams are scrunched up  (Dale+, Sept 2000) 

Top women players  (Tami+, Nov 2006) 

Typesetting backgammon  (Jason Lee+, Apr 2006) 

What is Zbot?  (Douglas Zare+, Dec 2003) 

What is backgammon?  (David C. Oshel, Aug 1997) 

Why do people play for money?  (Hank Youngerman+, Sept 2005) 

World Champions  (John Bazigos, June 1994) 

rec.games.backgammon mini-FAQ  (Daniel Murphy, Mar 1998) 

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