We Still Need Human Beings

by Mary Hickey
30 September 2008

Mary Hickey

Where would we be without backgammon bots? Does anyone remember numbering a paper from one to 36, with the 36 possible dice permutations listed beside them? All right, more likely you got out a photocopy of a form you had already made in advance, since that's what I used to do. We'd often spend an evening, or several, rolling out a position by hand and tabulating the results to approximate its equity.

Did you reduce the variance a bit by settling each game at the first calculable opportunity if the cube reached 8 or higher? How about by having the game end with a pass if a position was reached that you felt was pretty close to the border? Those were two of my methods, and you may have had others. But no matter what we did, the variance remained far too high for us to put our full faith and confidence in our 36, 72, or 108 trial results. Hand rollouts helped us get a feel for positions and so improved our playing, but they were too imprecise to yield definite answers.
 

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