On 7/9/06, Joseph Heled <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I may be wrong but offhand I can't remember any of Douglas ideas that were eventually implemented in gnubg.
That may be because, as I complained before, people have done a poor job of attributing ideas. See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnubg/2003-08/msg00346.html which, btw, was prompted by multiple requests for help analyzing rollouts truncated at a z-score threshold (# standard deviations). I have written no code for gnubg, but here are three topics that have been implemented in gnu in part due to my work: 1) The effective pip count. Of course Walter Trice had the idea before me, and wrote some articles in GammonVillage in his Beginners' Bootcamp series, around 17-19 IIRC. If you would like to say you got the idea from Walter instead, fine, make sure to acknowledge Walter. However, I think it was after I wrote a series of articles for GammonVillage and posted analyses of positions on Gammonline and rec.games.backgammon, some included in the rec.games.backgammon archive, that the idea was brought up here by people citing my work. 2) "Casual player" and the threshold of 3.5 mppm for world-class play. Suggesting the term is not very important, but it always jumps out at me when I see it. I also argued for using a stricter cutoff for "world-class" than Snowie's 4.4, and I recall tabulating the results of several actual live tournament matches from GammonVillage to show that an error rate of 3.5 is attainable by some good players. 3) Luck-adjusted match/session statistics. The idea of unbiased variance reduction is not originally mine, even within backgammon, I learned about it by reading David Montgomery's description of what was implemented in Jellyfish before I started playing backgammon seriously. However, I believe the idea of applying unbiased variance reduction to a match between two players was introduced by me in one of my pre-column GammonVillage articles (as one of the things I would most like to see in a bot). I mentioned it several times elsewhere, such as when I discussed wanting to apply unbiased variance reduction to the JF vs. Nack and Senk challenge, and when I discussed formats for a meaningful computer backgammon tournament. I believe several of those references were cited here before the luck-adjusted statistics were implemented. I'll be travelling for the next 10 days, so I will be out of regular e-mail contact. Douglas Zare _______________________________________________ Bug-gnubg mailing list Bug-gnubg@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnubg
