Obviously you guys confound semi-scientific with scientific. If you believe
that GnuBG is a product of scientific work, you are only fooling yourselves
(ironically as you may think that some of "you don't suffer fools gladly";).
And I was amused with Ian's saying "brusqeuness" to mean "rudeness":).
Over decades of discussing in rec.games.backgammon, I became rude
myself and came to tolerate rudeness of others. I try to never disvalue
someone's opinions simply because they express themselves rudely.
On the other hand, I cannot tolerate being undeservedly patronized by
semi-scientists with BS degrees, who are prone to resort doing this to
other people whenever they realize they have lost an argument. I can,
however, see that when they are given the tools and the step-by-step
instructions on how to use those tools, in order to prove to themselves
that they are wrong, retreating into denial is their only relief... :(
MK
On 4/28/2025 9:11 AM, Ian Shaw wrote:
Thank you Øystein for that obituary and summary of Joseph's work. I was very saddened to hear the
news even though my personal contact with him was only through the mailing list.
Gnubg made it's most exciting leagues in playing strength while Joseph was driving that aspect
forward. I was aware of some of his innovations but far from all.
You amused me with your description of his brusqeuness on the forum; he certainly did not suffer
fools gladly, not even imprecision.
Thank you,
Ian
On Fri, 25 Apr 2025, 19:10 Alessandro Scotti, <[email protected]> wrote:
It's very sad to hear this news. I never had the chance to meet Joseph in
person, but I knew
of him through his remarkable contributions to computer backgammon, and I
deeply admired his work.
I'm truly sorry for this loss. My sincere condolences to his family and
loved ones.
On Fri, Apr 25, 2025 at 12:46 PM Øystein Schønning-Johansen
<[email protected]> wrote:
It is with a real sorrow and heavy heart that I write this message.
Today I became aware
of the tragic passing of Joseph Heled. His wife, Edna, has informed us
through Hans-Jürgen
Schäfer the following:
"I have to tell you that Joseph is no longer with us. A month ago he
had a fatal cardiac
arrest while coming back from sports. Sudden, unexpected. We are still in
shock."
I strongly feel that this is a really big loss to the backgammon
community and the
community of backgammon programmers. Joseph was the inventor of so many
brilliant ideas
that made it into the GNU Backgammon code base. He was the main genius
behind the true
strength of GNU Backgammon. The neural networks he trained more 25
years ago are still the
best backgammon evaluator systems around. This is due to the ingenious
training method he
developed back then. He also found some of the fantastic smart methods
to speed up
evaluation such that GNU Backgammon gained more or less perfection. Let
me list some of
his clever ideas:
* The training method of supervised learning on a fixed dataset from
rollouts.
* The benchmark method where move selection is the measured loss.
* The splitting of neural networks into position classes for race,
contact and crashed.
* The introduction of smaller pruning neural networks to find move
candidates in deeper
plies.
* The table lookup of the exponential function which boosts the
sigmoid function.
* The trick of saving the inputs and the linear part of the first
layer from a previous
position evaluation - such that the nn inputs become mostly zeros -
zeros are skipped
such that the nn evaluation goes faster. (This might be my personal
favorite.)
... and many more. GNU Backgammon would not have been the same thing
without his insight
and brilliance.
In my communication with Joseph, he was really scientific. He always
checked his results
before stating any conclusion and I respected his findings as the
ground truth. His
insight - even when it came to something seamingly simple like race
positions - he had
analysed things deeper than anyone else. Our communications could be
mail threads of
nearly a hundred messages.
He could also be harsh and direct - especially here on this mailing
list if someone comes
with a loose claim or something semi-scientific. In that sense - he was
not afraid of
heated arguments.
He also wrote a computer implementation of the Royal Game of Ur, which
is considered a
precursor to backgammon - and like backgammon - a game that combines
both skill and luck.
https://github.com/jheled/royalur
In the later years he has studied a lot of backgammon and published
some interesting (and
very theoretical) videos on youtube about backgammon race doubles and
backgammon rating
systems. https://www.youtube.com/@josephheled-pepster
I strongly believe we have lost one of the best contributors to
computational backgammon.
Thank you, Joseph, and rest in peace. And my deepest condolences to
Edna and other family
members.
-Øystein
