[Bug-gnubg] GnuBG offline

[Peter Stewart]

I find the claim on your website that "It currently plays at about the 
level of a championship flight tournament player" to be unsustainable, 
indeed laughable.

The programme I have downloaded _cannot_ play well at all, and depends 
entirely for its outcomes on producing optimal dice for itself at 
critical points in each game.

I am not an outstanding backgammon player, but enjoy the game - in other 
words, a typical prospective customer for excellent software if I could 
only find any.

GnuBG is, without doubt, the least enjoyable of a pretty poor bunch of 
computer opponents I have tried.

It is quite easy to beat, losing gammons and backgammons fairly often 
and only able to deal effectively with a narrow range of playing styles. 
But more to the point, there are consistent practices written in that 
ruin any pleasure in the game and in fact render the software worthless 
in its present form.

For instance, when hitting a blot in its home board early in a game, 
there is an extremely high frequency of double-six dice for the 
opponent, or of locking out from re-entry by other statistically 
unlikely means.

Also, it is very common for the opponent to be trapped in GnuBG's home 
board behind small arrays because repeatedly unable to get a combination 
of high & low numbers on the dice.

But most absurd is that the programme doesn't bear off straight away 
when it is obviously going to lose, until what it assesses to be the 
last moment - and this can be _after_ a double throw would have cleared 
the player's board, so that GnuBG is obviously calculating the next 
throw in advance or taking a stupid risk of losing gammon for no reason 
at all..

Out of interest, I tried building a particular array in my home board, 
with points 2-6 made and leaving blots on points 1 and 7, then hitting a 
GnuBG blot.No less than  _four_ times out of five the next throw for 
GnuBG was 1 and 6, taking out both blots. This is utterly absurd, and a 
programme that needs to resort to such methods is unworthy of anyone's 
time & effort to play with, at any level of expertise.