Your message dated Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:31:52 -0800
with message-id <87ty2t3xvb....@windlord.stanford.edu>
has caused the report #659494,
regarding Resigns more points than necessary when fewer points would still
result in opponent win
to be marked as having been forwarded to the upstream software
author(s) bug-gn...@gnu.org
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659494: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=659494
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Hello, folks,
I received the following bug against the Debian gnubg package. I vaguely
recall that this implementation decision was discussed on the mailing list
before and that the current behavior is intentional, but I don't recall
whether there was discussion of making it a tuneable option or exactly
what the rationale was.
Josh Triplett <j...@joshtriplett.org> writes:
> Package: gnubg
> Version: 0.90+20120127-1
> When gnubg knows it will lose the current game, and knows that doing so
> will provide its opponent with enough points to win the match, gnubg
> will resign a gammon or backgammon if those still have a non-zero
> possibility of occurring, rather than just resigning a normal game. For
> example, in a 7-point match in which the doubling cube had reached 8,
> once I had enough checkers borne off to guarantee a win, gnubg offered
> to resign a gammon. Checking the probabilities afterward, gnubg had a
> 100% chance of losing, but only a 0.4% chance of losing a gammon.
> I assume its offer to resign more points than necessary occurred because
> gnubg considers all match losses equal in value. With all else equal,
> gnubg should not throw away more points than necessary; that would make
> gnubg's play more natural, and avoid making a loss seem unnecessarily
> overwhelming.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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