Actually, I have thought about it. There are two problems:
- From what I've understood, it requires some very special format rules that I know nothing about. - Also, from what I've seen, it is a text-only manual. This is a huge impediment in the usefulness of the manual IMO. I spend quite a lot of time explaining how to use and setup GNU to a number of players. In fact, this helps give a clear idea on its accessibility to the general public, and how it might really compare to a commercial product such as Snowie. Even with the multitude of pictures in my own 'manual' (hard to call a 50-page document a tutorial now), many people have a lot of trouble with it. I'm going to skip over the good parts of the program, which are many times many, so don't think this is open bashing. I just want to point out a couple of things that make it still lag behind, or break even at best. - Relational database: this will never be used as it is. As it stands, it will only be used by a programmer who also has a serious vested interest in backgammon. As far as I know, this means only GNBG developers and possibly a small handful of other users. Less than 10 I am certain. I myself tried and ran into roadblock after roadblock. - Setting up and analyzing a position. Saving the results. This is the part I spend the most time explaining as a rule. There are too many counterintuitive issues still for the user. One can learn the special steps, but they are mostly illogical, and far too many users freak in my experience. It's a bit as if I told you that to get into your house you had to dance on one foot or the key wouldn't enter. The problems (not including a couple of small bugs) are: a) You cannot set up a position upon entering the program. The Edit button is greyed out, and one MUST start a new game or match first. b) Upon setting up a position correctly, one must not try and analyze the position immediately. One must exit Edit mode first by repressing the Edit button, and only then ask GNU's advice. c) Even if you setup your position as you wanted, and analyzed it, you can still lose all your info by having the disastrous idea of saving it as a *position*. It seems completely natural to save a special position with analysis as a position, but here this means losing all the analysis. d) Inability to see the rollout settings or detailed results. Snowie solves this with a floating tip, so when you pass the mouse cursor over the move, you will see a floating tip appear with the details of the rollout. Such as the number of trials, the error margins, etc. In GNU the only way is to export the data somewhere. e) Finally, there is the issue of taking a position from a game/match, modifying it or the score, and then reanalyzing to understand the effect the changes have on its evaluation. One can't begin to stress how important a tool this is to learn and improve one's game. Aside from the rollouts and full match analysis, it is easily Snowie's most important learning tool. I love the program, as is clear, but as to lagging behind, the above on setting up and analyzing positions is where it really lags behind the competition IMHO. Albert On 9/20/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I'm going to make two versions: one downloadable and portable such >as PDF (with indexing), and a page-by-page HTML version, with a bar >of contents. Great. In fact I don't know if it makes sense to keep on having a (poor) gnubg manual and a good "tutorial", it's kind of wasting efforts. Ever thought about working on the manual ? IMO, the manual is the main (and probably only) area where gnubg is behind its competitors ...
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