I know you consider this to be text book black and white that ³if you drag
directly to the end position² that pick and pass should never be selected. I
disagree. 

Lets assume the bot does what you say in all cases.

What if you are trying to save backgammon. You have a piece on the  24
point, no men taken off (But your house has a prime) and you opponent opened
up and left his last checker on the 23 point. You roll 2-1 and you drag the
mouse from 24 to 21.

Tell me, when the bot jumps over because it won¹t hit, I think its
reasonable for someone to complain that ³Intent is clear, the bot should
know I will save backgammon and hit².

A persons expectations may not be the same given all circumstances. They
might believe the bot should smart enough to recognize that the intent was
to save backgammon. And I will quote from you ³we should strive to have a
parsing scheme that is as intuitive as possible²

So in my case I believe its intuitive to assume the bot should know full
well that this is a hitting play. For it to choose any other play would be
counter intuitive, at least from the perspective of the person who made the
play.

I think it could be argued that there are likely more positions where the
intuitive thing to do is to hit, rather than pass.

In the end, I¹d still be happy with the bot just making the first play it
found to be legal to get from position A to B.

On 09/04/09 2:05 PM, "Zulli, Louis P" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> 
> There is currently some "parsing" of "user checker actions on the gtk-board"
> to yield "actual backgammon moves." For example, my continuous checker slide
> from 6 to 3 was parsed as 6/5*/3 rather than 6/4/3. Even though a user can
> readily undo and redo a move, we should strive to have a parsing scheme that
> is as intuitive as possible. Perhaps I am atypical, but parsing my action as
> 6/5*3 is counter-intuitive. Philippe's suggestion that a continuous slide like
> mine never be parsed as pick and pass makes sense to me. Ideally, parsing of
> actions should not simply default to "pick the first legal interpretation" of
> the action based on some arbitrarily ordered list of legal interpretations.
> 
> Of course this is a small issue, but it seems like the kind of issue that
> should be discussed before any "official" release.
> 
> Louis
> 

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