playBunny: It's on the bottom of this page where you get directly from the Paid Membership page.

eagle eye: paypal is the easiest if you have an account. ;) IMO

eagle_eye, Purple: in other words, you can pay the BrainKing representative of your country.

Fencer: That link was hard to find. Took me several pages to find that page .. did I miss it or is it obscure? It's only because I knew that it exists somewhere that I went looking. I doubt that eagle eye would find it (except by accident when exploring, which is how I know).

I went via BrainKing Staff at the bottom of this page, then Eriisa (because Purple mentioned her). She has a link "Member of BrainKing.com customer service" on her profile page. From that I tried the Representatives link (not a word that spells money!) and only then did I see the alternative payment method.

There's surely a quicker way to that page but it wasn't from Paid membership which is the most obvious place.

Tuesday: You can't have too many ssss's, LOL

eagle eye: For me a check to Erlissa works the best.

What is the most used method to buy membership?

What is better PayPal or MoneyBookers? Can anybody share their experience?

Thanks.

Really Swell Site

;)

please read what I have said on gen chat about the RSS at top right hand and also the orange square at bottom right hand....I dont want to spam the boards :)

Saruman: Lol. Good for you. One of the secrets of dealing with stress is caring less .. then you get to enjoy more.

playBunny: i did change my profile thank you very much backgammon is a frustrating game but i've learned to cope with the stress... lol just kidding i don't even care anymore.

Chessmaster1000:

Luke Skywalker:
Yep correct, it happens when i write without thinking even a second........

playBunny: Tired of writing 3 times random number generator. So i followed your advice...

Chessmaster1000: Lol. RNG?? A TLA from the man who doesn't use abbreviations?

Luke Skywalker: Hah! I've been making that mistake for ... ever!! Yes, dancing for 9 rolls is reasonable at 4%. Even a 12-roll dance is not totally unbelievable at 1.25% and staying on the bar for 4, 5 or 6 rolls is almost to be expected at 23.3%, 16.2% and 11.2% respectively.

Thanks for pointing that out, Luke. Lol. I've been playing correctly, according to those figures, but, having made the wrong assumption all that time ago about the maths, my experience of seeing long dances so frequently was at odds with my understanding of the probabilities. When I read your correction it was a real Doh moment.

Chessmaster1000: The probability for this is: (11/36)^9 = 0.002%
Actually it's (1-11/36)^9 which is 3.8%

Grim Reaper:

I completely disagree! In fact i couldn't disagree more.... The act of not allowing 5 consecutive 4's for example or a specific series of rolls, because it doesn't seem fair for one player, is completely out of the philosophy of a luck-based game.......!

A good random number generator is important for having a decent Backgammon game, but having a bad random number generator is not unfair as long as the system doesn't give advantage to a specific player. If there is a flaw at the RNG, but there is no advantage settled from before for a specific player, then everything is fair.
And as i want to believe and believe, that there is no advantage given to any player, then every hypothetical flaw giving too many consecutive doubles, is not unfair. Of cource as i've said, such a flaw doesn't give a decent Backgammon game.......

But i wonder, i have played 450+ Backgammon games here and i have never seen more than 2 consecutive doubles for a player........In fact i can even complain about too "normal" distribution of the rolls......And this is a fact in my opinion. Also it's a fact that there are no wild series of rolls and this is somewhat related to my other observation.


PlayBunny

on the bar when there's an open point. Nine rolls on the trot and I can't get one of the 11/36 rolls that will let me in? That's beyond belief! But it "happens regularly", so let's fix that one please.

The probability for this is: (11/36)^9 = 0.002% so my goat sacrifices paid off....

Test

rod03801: Nick changed, my profile still says "First login: 23. July 2003, 02:09:52"
Changing back...

Grim Reaper: I don't object to pre-rolled dice at all, in fact I'd like it. I'd like to be able to decline a doubling cube and then know what rolls my opponent and I were going to get so that I can sigh with relief or kick myself.


"For example, a chess program that uses a transposition table to store positions that are encountered frequently can actually stuff more positions into the same amount of RAM with a better random number generator used to stamp the tokens used as the masks. Better randomness in these "hash tables" can also allow for faster retrieval of the data in these RAM buffers."

Congratulations - you've achieved a very high technobabble score! .. Getting back to the dice... ;-)


I don't think "Mr Profile"'s objection is to runs of doubles as such. I'd say it probably refers to cases where a couple of doubles during the bearoff (consecutive or not) has made a losing difference. Perhaps he doesn't appreciate that doubles occur, on average, once in every six rolls.

The issue of doubles, and lucky dice in general, is more a function of the mind than of the dice themselves. Fix the rolls in all sorts of ways and there will still be an ever growing selection of people making assertions about their "The dice are fixed" perceptions, not realising that they are cataloging and remembering the rolls inaccurately. Four "consecutive" double sixes, for instance, may have actually occurred with a 3-4 rolled in the middle. The cry that goes up whenever someone complains about unfair dice is always "Don't just say it, show us the record". And rightly so.


It's an interesting idea, tampering with the random sequence. I've never seen 5 consecutive double-sixes, let alone 8, so I wouldn't care about removing those sort of patterns. What I'd be more interested in is not being stuck on the bar when there's an open point. Nine rolls on the trot and I can't get one of the 11/36 rolls that will let me in? That's beyond belief! But it "happens regularly" (), so let's fix that one please.

Every now and then someone on one of the boards has an issue with the backgammon dice. Usually the complaint is that someone who was losing rolled a highly improbable cascade of doubles and won at the very end of the game.

I am not a gammon player, but I have done some research on "randomness". It sounds odd to most people, but randomness is actually a subset of the domain of artificial intelligence and programming, and it is important to have certain processes simulate randomness.

For example, a chess program that uses a transposition table to store positions that are encountered frequently can actually stuff more positions into the same amount of RAM with a better random number generator used to stamp the tokens used as the masks. Better randomness in these "hash tables" can also allow for faster retrieval of the data in these RAM buffers.

Getting back to the dice...

I was doing some more research recently, and I also saw this is someone's profile here on BK:

not playing it for a while due to so many losses of people getting stupid double's at the end of the game and winning everything. My favorite game now is froglet and I'll try any other game but backgammon.

Using different ideas from a few papers I read, there is a way to make everyone on here happy, without having that long cascade of doubles, or other scenarios (maybe lots of 1-2 rolls in a row can also be bad.)

Arrange all of the dice like this:

1-1
1-2
1-3
...
6-4
6-5
6-6

Now
, take a poll among the gammon community. What should be the maximum number of rolls of any particular combination that should be tolerated consecutively?

Say, a 6-6 should not be rolled more than 3 times in a row by one player, but maybe a 3-3 or 4-4 can be rolled more often.

Poll the entire community for every roll.

Next, create millions of "tapes" of thousands of consecutive rolls where all of the consecutive criteria are not exceeded, yet all other dice rolls are, for all intents and purposes, purely random.

Every player at the start of every game gets one of these tapes. No two tapes are every re-used.

When you run low on tapes, crank out more.

I know players object to pre-rolled dice, but the good thing is, you won't ever have someone run 8 straight double 6's on you when you are ahead by a mile, nor will you get snagged with 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, when you are almost home.

And, unlike other pre-rolled dice websites, the tapes are destroyed after each use, and never re-used, so the overall result would be "truly random" but with those nasty rolls totally removed.

Yes, we'll have to wait for Fencer to approve it. I changed it to Pedro Martínezz.

It might take a while. I think all nic changes are approved by Fencer now. Though maybe that is just the profile part..

OK, I'll change my nick now. Let's see what will happen.

i can see you're point! i was only tossing out ideas that could explain what you were seeing. maybe it is just a bug! got any computer-compatable ani-biotics? lol

Right, but it shouldn't! I like to see how long someone has been playing on brainking. And I am also proud that I have been here for quite a while, and don't want that to change if I ever decide to change my nic.

i was thinking that if it was a recent change, it might only work on recent nic changes.

tazman7474: I doubt that...look at Chuck's profile for instance:
http://brainking.com/cz/Profile?u=5745
He's definitely changed his nick since logging in for the first time.

maybe one of the recent changes counts the first log in on the new nic!

Hm...that's intersting. The only explanation that comes to my mind right now is that Fencer set the start of the membership to June instead of July since the Czech names of these months are very similar (červen, červenec).

If it IS that, then I'm thinking it's probably a bug, because I don't recall that happening in the past, when someone changed their nic.

I was thinking that. But, it shouldn't change the "First login" date, in my mind.

rod03801: do you think it could be from a change in a nic?

LOL.. "someone" was just a general term. I didn't want to necessarily mention names. But Saruman below is an example.

rod03801: Who is it? I looked for "someone", but found only "someonespecial" who is a pawn.

It seems like I am running into a lot of profiles lately where their first login to the site is later than when their membership started. (For example, someone's rook membership would be June 1, 2005 to December 1, 2005. Then lower down it says their first login was July 11, 2005.) How can this be? I have run in to at least 4 or 5 over the last couple weeks.

Saruman: How about grabbing one of the games in the Waiting games area, or creating a few of your own?

You might like to change your profile message too, lol. Glad to see you're back into a bg frame of mind. ;-)

if anyone want's to play backgammon or any varient's of it with me invite me

who want's to play a game of line4 or froglet with me?

BuilderQ and playBunny and Fencer: Thanks for the replies.

reza: As playBunny said, bold italics are acheived by nesting the tags.

Color... let me test: <font color="red">test</font>

Fencer: How about color and BOLD ITALIC?

reza: You cannot set a font size here. At least not now.

playBunny: how about bold italic? And, for the size and color, please tell me how I should write the code and what I want the code to have effect on. For example if I want to type Reza with a font sized 20 and in Red, what should I type?

Thanks so much

Use <i>italics</i> to get italics and <b>bold</b> to get bold.
You can nest the two <i>it<b>ali</b>cs</i> gives italics

Sorry, I don't know how to get font sizes and colors - the standard html tags are simply converted to text:
Not working:
<span style="font-size: 24px">Big</span>
<font size="24px">Big</font>

I don't know if it's the right place to ask, but: How do I use italic fonts here on BrainKing and is there a way to change the size too? or maybe the color?

Fencer:

pauloaguia: Have a look at What's New page now.

Fencer: Another suggestion. On some pages there is some sort of special code that makes some browsers react to it. For instance, in Opera, whenever I visit a page that somehow has some RSS connection, A small blue RSS icon appears on the address bar. If I click on it I immediatelly get the option of subscribing that feed.
I think it has something to do with code like
<link rel="alternate" href="ADDRESS/news.rss" type="application/rss+xml" title="Server news"/>

I think it could be a nice thing to implement here as well, and that code could go on the ServerNews page. At least while there is no reference to the RSS feed anywhere on the site (that I've seen, anyway).

pauloaguia: Good idea.