WhiteTower: Of course. :)

frolind: Of course, that's WALTER Trice, not EDWARD Trice - one for the 10x8 board followers here to snigger about :)

frolind: On the other hand, if the cube were taken out of play, the player
who is behind would have to win a bunch of undoubled games in order to
recover. This would give being one point away from winning too much value.

i think being one point away from winning should be valued this high .. the battle to reach that amount of points has been done .. and won by the player who is only one point away from winning ..

i think it would be the same as to give a player a chance to pass a 6-wide block (maybe just by throwing 6+6 or something like that :)) .. because the block is too powerful

If the Crawford rule remained in effect for the rest of the match, this would make it too hard to catch up, which would give too large a reward for a lucky early win.

hmm .. true .. i forgot about the luck .. a player could be lucky enough to reach that 'one point away from winning' .. it doesnt have to because of a 'battle'

it's just one more thing that has to be explained to people who are new to match play

hehe .. thats me .. and proving it :)

proposed replacing it with the rule that you have to win by two points (like in tennis, etc.) This rule would also eliminate a lot of the 'anomolous' cube action that comes up near the end. The problem was that organizers objected that a match could go on 'forever' with the players swapping one-point leads. I kind of like the idea anyway. But no one else does ;-)

i do! .. great idea!

(i play squash .. and always have the idea i can still win although i might be 8-0 behind in points .. in squash at 8-8 the player who is not serving has the choice to finish the game at 9 points (as normal) or at 10 points .. that might be a nice option for backgammon as well .. when the player is 2 points from winning and the other player is 1 point from winning .. then the player can chose to add 1 more to the total amount of points to be reached ?)

Hrqls: Here's a couple of posts by Trice and Wolsey regarding this:
http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+667
http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+246

frolind & AbigailII: ah thanks .. it was called the 'crawford rule' indeed .. i didnt remember .. but it made me think of cindy indeed ;)

i can understand why it is not allowed on the first game after a player is 1 point away from winning .. but why allow it again after that first game ? the advantage for the other player is still there

i wasnt favourite (less than 10 steps ahead on him after my turn and a lot of steps to go :)) when i offered the doubling at 1-2 .. but he accepted anyway .. i guessed he would as he was playing very defensive in his games as well .. he didnt dare the risk (although he was building a nice block just before my home .. so i saw some problems with that and think he was the favourite :))

so the rule was applied correctly it seems .. i just cant see the logic to allow the doubling on any subsequent games :)

Hrqls: That's the Crawford rule, which states that if one player is 1 point away from winning, you can't use the doubling cube during the first game where the player is 1 point away from winning. But one can use the cube on any subsequent games.

Hrqls: In matches we use a rule called the crawford rule, which says that doubling isn't allowed in the first game after one player has reached one-away (2 in a match to 3, 4 in a match to 5, etc.). After that game doubling is allowed again.
In your 1-2 game, your opponent should drop if you are a favourite, since by dropping he would be 50-50 to win the game from the score 2-2 (assuming equal strength).

yesterday i played on playsite.com for the first time .. i wanted to play backgammon with the cube :)

it was a 3 points match

i lost the first game, i lost the second game

then the game told me in the third game we couldnt use the doubling cube (which i understand as i would always have offered a double as it would make no difference to me if i would lose with 1 or 2 points, but it would make a difference if i would win)

i won that game (yay! :))

so it was then 2-1 for my opponent

in the next game .. the doubling cube was allowed though .. which was a bit weird to me ..

so i offered to double about halfway the game .. which he declined, so i won that game as well and ended up at 2-2

are you allowed to double when the score is 2-1 ??
it only had an advantage for me .. the game would already win the match for my opponent .. but if doubled it would also win the match for me ..
the doubling only had an advantage for me in this case

i lost the last game (which he started with 4 doubles in a row .. growl! ;))

but it made me wonder about the cube

i do that sometimes to hehe, or i'll look at my opponents dice by accident

alanback: LOL could be.Will old age do that to you he he LOL

THE HIT MAN: My eyes may be going bad, but sometimes I swear the dice change in the course of a move. I will read them as 3-2 but after the first click they are 3-3. Since the numbers are always similar, I assume it's my own eyesignt or inattentiveness, but maybe something like that is happening to you also.

frolind: Thats odd its working ok now

THE HIT MAN:

frolind: Thanks but it is to time comsumming.just go look at them.

THE HIT MAN: Could you post some examples from your games? I don't understand your questions.

As i am just new to backgammon games. Could someone please tell me about this
Ok coming out of bar the dice show 4 and 2.you come out moving 3 position.Plus other #s do it to
This happens to me in alot of the games
Also your dice show up as doubles and there is a position open but you can not move.
But in some of the games you can with low score doubles on the dice.

We could get this good a discussion going about backgammon!

Lolol. Nice wriggle. :-))

Unit names with prefixes are treated "as per 9.2" because that's the clause that deals with unit names, while "A derived unit is usually singular" is stated explicitly and derived units would not, therefore, be "as per 9.2".

Science-based I am but my interest here is mainly in English. The NIST stuff was all news to me and just a chance for a bit of pedantic quibbling, er, I mean fun, lol. ;-)

The last word's yours, my friend (unless you drop a big clanger, lolol).

Forgeting my pedactic nature for a while and if we want this thread to stay we should stop here......:-)

But on the other way.........:
This defines "centimetre" as a unit name that has a prefix. It doesn't fall into a distinct "prefix-unit" class. Therefore it is treated as per 9.2.
This "therefore" is wrong. From where do you conclude that? With that logic the derived units also should be treated as per 9.2. But they are not.........

Anyway i agree that there should be a discussion board for pedantic, hmmmmm no, i mean people interested at science.......... :-)

"9.2 plurals: Plural unit names are used when they are required by the rules of English grammar."

This is straightforward.

"9.3 Spelling unit names with prefixes"

This defines "centimetre" as a unit name that has a prefix. It doesn't fall into a distinct "prefix-unit" class. Therefore it is treated as per 9.2.

It seems clear enough to me, George, but I know you don't like to be wrong, so let's see how you wriggle. ;-p

Luke Skywalker: Hmmm in this things i'm almost always correct...........:-)
But as i see now i'm not correct or incorrect as NIST hasn't defined clearly what is happening with "prefix"-units.

So from http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec09.html#9.7 :
"A derived unit is usually singular in English"

And from http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html :
we see that centimetre it's not a base unit, but not a derived one too, it's a "prefix"-unit if we can say that.

So what ist's the final judgement......?


Walter:
I don't said that because you have used "and" instead of "+" but because you hadn't used ( ) between the numbers.
It's wrong to say this is 5 and 1/2 meter tall.
The correct is (5 and 1/2) meter tall.
Because in the first case the meter goes to the 1/2 ONLY while 5 remains a single number and not a unit of length.........

playBunny: actually, CM1000 is incorrect, the plural is preferred, see http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec09.html
Even better is to use the symbol.

Where is the science discussion board?

lolol. Pedanticsemantics. Okay, backgammon be damned, I'll join in too.

Walter is quite correct with his original "33 and 1/3 centimeters" (apart from it being centimetREs in *proper* English, hee hee). Due to the use of the plural there's no option to construe the 33 as merely a number and the 1/3 as the measure.

"1/3 centimetres" is incorrect English. It would be "1/3 centimetre" which is shorthand for "1/3 of a centimetre". Writing "1/3 of a centimetres"? Well, you can see how wrong that is. (Though, interestingly, the plural is correct for decimal fractions, eg 0.5 oranges)

Therefore, when Walter says "33 and 1/3 centimeters", the plurality, and hence the centimetreness, must cover the 33 as well.

Chessmaster1000; I didn't understand why you said "better not to use plural". If I say "It measures 2 centimetre." then it feels as if I'm talking like a foreigner.

Chessmaster1000: Repetion is the key to redundancy!
I'm not sure where you're from, but around here the "+" sign and the word "and" mean almost exactly the same thing. As I wouldn't write the word "and" or use the "+" sign if I was to write it on paper, I suppose I could've just put 33 1/3 cm. I wanted to avoid confusion, but apparently you got confused. Oh well. Writing numbers and how they are spoken look different.
So I'll say it like this next time.
Thirty-three and one third centimeters. How's that?

I have to correct your correctness:
A third of a meter is not 33.33 centimeters.
It's not even 33 and 1/3 centimeters.
It is (33 + 1/3) centimeter or (33 + 1/3) centimeters (better not to use plural but it's acceptable too (if you have used the cm prefix instaed of the whole word, then the cms would not be acceptable) ..........

Pedro Martínez: A third of a meter is not 33.33 centimeters. It is 33 and 1/3 centimeters. An eleventh of a kilometer is 90 and 10/11 meters.
Engineer you are I take it? :)

Luke Skywalker: I'll argee that the standard system is nothing if it's not illogical, arbitary, and confusing, but it works. The United States did adopt decimal money in the late 1700's. All on powers of tens: mils, cents, dimes, dollars, and eagles, though just dollars and cents are commonly used. I have heard the English had some wild way of doing their money that probably had its adherents like I am for the standard system and yet it looks like I'm nuts to someone that only uses the metric system. Money is different though. One can go from cents to millions in the same account and all the digits are used. Having different units for each part of the Sterling Pound must've made for a lot of confusion. When one is using inches or millimeters, you rarely need to be taking miles or kilometers into account. And nowadays we have calculators.
I use both systems, since they're both in use here. Beer's in ounces, liquor is sold in milliliters. Hospitals have cc's and grams for most things.

It's easy to convert one system to the other. Calling it a mile or 1.6 kilometers doesn't change how far away something is. The difficult part of converting is the hard conversions. Instead of 12 ounces to 355 millliters we'll make it 300 or 400 milliliters. This type of change requires a lot of money and of course customer acceptance of the different size. I remember when Canada had 300 milliliter size Coca Cola cans. They went metric and now it's 355 milliliters!

<b/>Let's make a Backgammon game based on powers of ten. We can call it Metric Backgammon. Each table will have ten points in it. So the board will have 40 points total. Of course we'll have to use a pair decahedron shaped dice numbered 1 through 10. Wouldn't matter on an internet game site. Should we leave it at 15 checkers per side?