Yes, I just figured out that if you roll a 1-4 with only one piece left 3 spaces away from where you bear off you have no choice but to hit the blot right in front of you.

Key McKinnis: Yea that is always like that..... and you know, the rules says if you can use both dice - you have to use both dice.... even at the end.

What's the purpose of writing a rule of a game when the system does not apply it?

Look at this move White to play 65. White is forced according to rules to unblock a point in the 6 prime to allow an opponent to move.

This is the corresponding rule Brainking has:
It is allowed to build a prime (six consecutive blocked points) anywhere else (not in the player's starting quarter), but if opponent has collected all his checkers onto the one point behind player's prime, the player must unblock a point in his prime to allow the opponent a chance to move.

The implementation has also another serious flaw.
I will make an overview in some days about what improvements need to be made in Fevga in this site, to the rules and to the implementation that is buggy.

Constellation36: Yes, that looks like a bug to me also. Of course if you wait a long time to tell anyone, or tell no one - it is hard for bugs like that to be fixed.

On the game page, in the upper left hand corner is a "bug" icon - click on that to report a bug on that game. Include the same information you wrote here there - and hopefully the bug can be fixed.

(Fencer, game programmer does not always read the boards on a regular basis - so best to leave it in the bug tracker so he can easily see the list of bugs that need fixed.)

Hi folks, does anyone understand why I only got 1 pont for this match with doubling cube? I got a backgammon so was expecting more.. Am I being dim and not understood something with the rules? :)

Would be very much appreciated if somone could explain...


Backgammon (Anjil vs. SentineL)

Anjil: When I looked at the game it shows at the very top that you have 2 points and your opposition has only 1 and after 2 games that is correct as you got 2 pts for your win and they got 1 for their win.

Hi skipinnz, I see two points now too, it only showed 1 point before, my apponent saw the same thing, 1 point before and now 2 - at least it's correct now - thanks for your response!!

Anjil: you're welcome

Anjil:  Also, you did not score a backgammon (3 pts), you scored a gammon (2 pts)

alanback: Oh!! .. is this a bug with the scoring?

Anjil: no bug, your opponent got all of his pieces out of your home so you did not score a backgammon, but he did not get any pieces off so the score is a gammon which is worth 2 points

Vikings: Thanks for clearing that up! I, for some reason, misunderstood a backgammon as being when the other player still had pieces outside of their home base before you got all your off. That aside, the scoring did initally give me one point but that later chenged to 2. Thanks folks for helping out!!

LOL it seem's very odd when you play backgammon your opponent get's all the doubles at the end when you need them & when i play anti backgammon i get them when i don't need them LOL I guess it's just bad luck hey

"GERRY": Oh no, it isn't bad luck at all. Obviously you have been singled out and Fencer has written a specialized script that activates in any games you play, looks to see what dice will best suit your opponent and would least suit you, and the script automatically plays those selections.

Well, that was kind of a joke just to illustrate how ridiculous it is to suggest the dice are anything other than random

paully: Even so, I think every backgammon player has occasionally felt very badly used by the dice :-)  It doesn't always help to know that even a perfectly random system can (indeed, must occasionally) mimic the behaviour of a malevolent demon!

Is there an easy way to pull all the dice rolls and analyze them? I *NOT* accusing Brainking of doing anything wrong, I just think some of us math geeks might have fun seeing the results.

Thad: Hmmm, you say "easy"... ... I'm not even sure that there's a hard way!

AlliumCepa: I *think* that they're trying to find some means of analyzing the rolls themselves--in isolation--apart from the way they might be used in backgammon.  I suspect there are (or were, a while ago) some fairly regular departures from randomness in the routine(s) that govern the rolls here.  But analyzing and demonstrating that would have been difficult.

playBunny: Further to my "not sure there's a hard way", there are several steps.

** First get a lot of matches. That's a fair challenge in itself.

** Unless Fencer has fixed the .mat export bug which makes multi-game match files useless, you'd need to run each match file through a script that would fix the error.

** Run the matches through another program that will extract the dice rolls.

** Do your analyses. Here it's very much a question of how complex you want it - whether you want to look at dice independantly of the games, ie. just streams of rolls, or whether you want to know about dice in relation to the players and positions. The latter would be a considerable adventure in programming.

playBunny: What about dice rolls in relationship to the time? For example, if 10 different people were to make a roll in different games all at the exact same time, would there be any type of correlation, IE would they all have the same dice rolled, or a higher rate of this?


I know it seems like sometimes I will log on and play a few quick moves, and it seems more often than random that I make the same roll in all the games....


Also, I think I remember being told that in casinos, the video and or slot machines give any specific result on one play, based on the exact time that you pull the lever or hit the play button? Something like all the potential outcomes are spinning around in the machine, and which outcome you get is based purely on the timing of when you hit play?

Czuch: Whenever someone says "it seems more often than random that ..." about a random process it seems more often than not that it's their brain seeming things and not the random process.

Without knowing how BrainKing's dice are generated I can say nothing with certainty about the rolls, however, as I see absolutely no benefit to Fencer or the players in having every dice generated according to the clock it would surprise me greatly if it were the case.

But it's moot anyway because there's no way for us to determine the timing of dice events.

playBunny: Yeah, I know... it was just a recent 3 day period where I logged on and my first three games each day all had the same dice roll ( not the same roll all 9 games, but the same one for 3 games each day)


We do not know when the dice rolls are generated, is that it?

For awhile, I thought it was when the player actually clicked to see the game for the first time after it was their turn again. But then it seemed like it was generated right after the opponent made their move, but was only revealed when the next player came to see it?

You are right, there is no way to know for sure, except ask Fencer?

Czuch:
There is a way, but a *very* hard one: The random numbers generators in programming languages are implemented as a function modulo m (for us with unknown m), in the simplest such random function there is a start number s, and the random numbers r1, r2, etc. are generated as s mod m =3 etc. There exist math proofs that random generators that include the modulo
function, even if they are not so simple as the one before, are always cyclical, i.e. after some thousand random numbers r1, r2, ..., rx they start from the beginning.
So if you play some very slow dice game like Anti Backgammon with a friend and the goal of both, not to win but to count the dice numbers, you may find out
a repating sequence of about 5000 - 6000 numbers. And
in a real game you can after 4 - 5 moves guess the next "random number". (Have not tested it, would be too hard effort just for winning some games...)

CryingLoser:Are you assuming there is a separate incidence of the random number generator for each game?  I think that is very unlikely, and that it is more likely that the same RNG is used for all games on the site.  This would make it impossible for two players to anticipate any cyclical result.

alanback:
Yes, the assumption was that the generator has for each game a new initialisation. As you mentioned, there is also a second way possible, just one RNG for all games.
And only this second way is the right one - if Fencer implemented his RNG according to the first way, then
sooner or later somebody will count the cycle of the numbers...

CryingLoser: if Fencer implemented his RNG according to the first way, then
sooner or later somebody will count the cycle of the numbers...

Er, how "later" can your scale go?!

So... from what i read of the discussion on the BK board, it seems like the dice might be contingent upon the exact timing of when it is rolled, or am I misunderstanding still?

Czuch:This is probably also true with physical dice  :-)

AlliumCepa: do they smell like napalm?

AlliumCepa: dices? like a salad?

Why all this talk about the randomness of the dice? There appears to be no evidence that it isn't.

Czuch: True. Can it proceed several things in the same millisecond or would that just be fast. One for a pc geek.

AlliumCepa: A millisecond is a long time for a modern computer. My 3.0 GHz AMD can produce over 250,000 dice rolls per second using a very basic formula (although it doesn't do anything further with the dice).

But for online backgammon you need to take into acount the context in which the dice roll occurs. There's an html page to be generated for each dice roll. Fencer fills each game page with loads of information, some of which requires access to the database. I think that 1 page per millisecond would be impressive even for a server written in Java.

Nice infos about power and outcome. As the keyword Tetrahertz gives less than 100 results with google (german), I'm guessing that you'll muddle on for a while like it is now.

gogul: Shouldn't it be 'terahertz'?

Thad: ah. Mega, giga, tera, peta ...

Thad:Yes, I believe a tetrahertz is a rented fish. ;-)

alanback: I think that model glows in the dark, blue and red

paully: Did you know that the recycling of tetrapacks to roof tiles is a Brazil innovation? :)

gogul: Did you know that the recycling of tetrapacks to roof tiles is a Brazil innovation?

That would be have been good protection against the droppings of ptetrasaurs, which inhabited Brazil up to about 70 million years ago.

playBunny: I have to let that fall. If I'd ever been high this could tell me that pterasaurs 'peut-être' droped petas (stones if Internet was correct)!

gogul:This whole discussion is just pterrible!

alanback: it's a bit like italian football.

gogul: I prefer italian meatballs, which during the stoneage , were made from pterasaurs

Bwild: I'd like to talk with Cheney immediatly. Can I?

Or will he give me a clout just for asking?