Re: [Bug-gnubg] random dice generator? hahahaaa

[tchow]

> I keep thinking there's some kind
> of paper to be written on the subject but given that bg is such a
> small niche community I'm guessing it won't happen.

I've suggested before that one could try to make a profit by selling
insurance to people who are convinced that the dice are rigged.  That
is, if they are convinced that they are about to throw an anti-joker
or that their opponent is about to throw a joker then they can buy
insurance against that outcome.

Of course no money is involved when someone plays GNU Backgammon on
their own computer, but perhaps a feature could be added where you
can make "side bets" on the dice.  If this were implemented, then I
would predict that people would lose money on the side bets but that
they would perceive the dice to be fair (that is, they would convince
themselves that the bot is more interested in rigging things to win
the side bets than it is in rigging things to win the games).  If so
then this might result in greater customer satisfaction.

The other feature that might be interesting is to allow players to
receive a handicap, not by having the computer make mistakes, but by
having the dice rigged in their favor.  That is, instead of a truly
random roll, the roll can be slightly biased towards a lucky roll for
the player and an unlucky roll for the computer opponent.  The nice
thing about this feature is that it provides some entertainment value
even for "rational" players because they can then think about the
best way to exploit the known bias in the dice.

Tim