Firstly, let me be forthright that my purpose with these experiments is to debunk the so-called "cube skill theory" or at least raise serious doubts about it. So, I'd fully understand you guys' unwillingness to contribute to it by helping me with my scripts, etc.
With that said, since the crude script I had posted here, I decided that instead of duplicating Axel's experiment, (which I was the one who had suggested), I would start with an even more radical "mutant cube experiment" where the mutant doubles and takes randomly but never resigns. I can't imagine any worse cube strategy than doubling or taking even when one's winning chances are near zero. To make up for that "no cube skill at all" the mutant never drops, this in effect, turning the cubeful game into a cubeless game as much as possible by forcing it to be played out until the end or until the bot drops. I have two other experiments planned and may come up with more later on. I will share my scripts so that, instead of taking my word for things, you can use them to run your own experiments to see the results for yourselves. I have documented what they do using lots of comments. It asks for a starting game number for a session and for the number of games to run. On my, probably below average CPU, it takes about 15 minutes for 100 games. That works out to about 10,000 games in 24 hours. I suggest you run it in sessions of 100-500 games and from the Python interactive interpreter, so that, if it fails you still will have a chance to view and save things. It saves each game with a long filename containing lots of stats and finally saves the match with a similar name. All this is documented in the script. If you want neatly consecutive game numbers, use the last game number as the start of session, i.e. after session=0, games=100, going from 1 to 100, you can enter session=101 and games = 100 to go from 101 to 200, etc... You can download the script from: https://montanaonline.net/backgammon/py/MuratMutantCubeRandom.py The directory listing of filenames for my first run of 100 are saved in a text file that you can download from: https://montanaonline.net/backgammon/py/MuratMutantCubeRandom.txt I also imported the text file into a spreadsheet, (with sorted O's and X's wins, including totals), that you can download from: https://montanaonline.net/backgammon/py/MuratMutantCubeRandom.ods One outstanding feature of my script is that it can go beyond the maximum 4,096 cube value limit of GnuBG by recycling the cube value without altering the cube ownership, as many times as it may be needed. In my first session of 100 games, I was lucky enough to see the cube go as high as 2^34 = 17,179,869,184 I ran another 100 and two 500 game sessions with the following points won Gnubg World-Class checker and cube, Mutant World-Class checker and random cube as described above): Gnubg = 543,696,648 Mutant= 17,180,933,757 Gnubg = 6,995,268 Mutant= 9,344 Gnubg = 4,441,646,726 Mutant= 1,076,936,738 Gnubg = 6,764,733,622 Mutant= 2,152,163,991 Granted this much is hardly significant sampling but I think it gives a hint of what you may expect in the long run. Don't take my word for anything; run your own sessions as long as you want. I predict that the results will be quite unsettling to most of you. Please share any results that you may get. MK
