[Bug-gnubg] Gnu backgammon

[Taper_Mike]

Hi Barb,

Don't get discouraged! Yours is a common concern among those who are new to
high-quality backgammon software such as GnuBg. It plays better than any
human on earth, including the likes of Mochy, Falafel, and the rest of the
world's top players. When it beats you, it is not because it cheats. It just
plays better than you!

Russ Allerby came up with the easiest way to prove GnuBg is not cheating.
Simply activate the GnuBg Tutor, and take it's advice on every move. When
you activate the tutor, it will pop up to interrupt you whenever it thinks
you have made a significant misplay. The GnuBg tutor won't interrupt you
when you make a small mistake, so you will still not be playing as well as
GnuBg does. That means you will not win exactly half the time, but you
should win your fair share of games, I think well over 40%. You can turn on
the tutor using these commands:

        Settings > Options > Tutor > Tutor Mode

It sounds like you are new to GnuBg, so let me also suggest that you select
World Class play in the following three places. To change these settings,
you have to click the triangle for the drop-down list that contains "World
Class."

        Settings > Analysis... > Analysis Level
        Settings > Players... > Player 0 > GNU Backgammon
        Settings > Rollouts... > Play settings > First Play Both

Another setting new uses should check is Eval Threads. This lets you turn on
multithreading. If your computer has an Intel duo-core chip, for instance,
you will have two cores, each of which can run two threads. The total number
of threads in this example is 4. If you have a quad-core chip, then the
total number of threads is 8. Once you figure out how many threads your
computer can run, you should enter that number here:

        Settings > Other > Eval Threads

This is an important setting because the default is 1. When you increase it,
GnuBg will run much faster for many tasks.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Mike Mannon

P.S. For several decades now, neural-net-based backgammon programs such as
GnuBg have been beating the pants off human opponents. That has generated a
whole a slew of assertions that the programs must be cheating, but, of
course, they are not. Most developers have gotten tired of the question, so
they are sometimes impatient when it arises. Yours was a reasonable inquiry
from a new user, so it has been well-received here. In the past, however, we
have had some trolls who won't drop the issue. You will find that they get
short shrift on this list.