2. The score might make a difference because we're
itching for a gammon. Thus we need to consider the
banana split 5/4*. But Black has no other blots to
pick up, so I'm not sure if 5/4* is called for. If
we do play 5/4* then the question is whether 13/8
(for another builder, but not on a different point)
or 21/16 (for better board coverage) is the 5. I think
I would go with 13/8. But do we play 5/4* at all?
Ah, very nice! So what is the story...was everything
canceled the last year (or two?) and are things back to
normal as far as the Japan Open is concerned?
It seems that I scored 7/10, which may be the highest score that I've
ever achieved on an Othello quiz. I see that one of the ones I got
wrong was the "easiest" problem as measured by how many participants
got it right!
Congratulations to Yokota Kazuki, who has won the competition three
times in a row (allowing for the fact that there was no competition
in 2020 or 2021).
There are some interesting (to me) points of comparison between competitive backgammon-problem-solving and competitive chess-problem-solving.
On 5/8/2022 5:39 AM, peps...@gmail.com wrote:
There are some interesting (to me) points of comparison between competitive backgammon-problem-solving and competitive chess-problem-solving.I would say that the biggest difference is that backgammon simply
offers less scope for competitive problem solving, by the nature
of the game.
One way to see this is to pose the question, how many backgammon
problems can you compose without appealing to a bot as an oracle?
The answer is, very few. For the standard "what's the best move"
problem, you're pretty much limited to a few non-contact problems.
There is also not a lot of scope for retros or proof games, as you
will quickly discover if you try to compose such a problem. I have
seen a few nice nonstandard problems ("Which play leaves the fewest
shots?") but they are not rich enough to form an entire genre.
Okay, let's say we're willing to countenance a bot as oracle. This
is a huge aesthetic flaw, because for example, standard "what's
the best move" problems cannot be solved with certainty. In chess, if
you find the mate in 3, you can confirm the correctness of the answer
during the test. This is not possible in backgammon if the bot is an
oracle. It also raises the question of which bot you're going to use
and which settings and so on. This is one nice feature of the Othello
Quiz: Othello is very good about choosing positions where there is a
huge equity difference between the right play and any other play. This
means that the problem is "robust" to changes in bot technology. If
we were to use your proposed scoring system, people's rankings might
change with changes in the bot---another inelegant feature.
I have occasionally had the opportunity to compose puzzles for
competitions, in which the type of puzzle was almost completely up
for grabs---it could be a word puzzle, a logic puzzle, a math puzzle,
a trivia puzzle, etc. I definitely considered making a backgammon
puzzle, but couldn't come up with a good one. Unless you have a
population of solvers who is docile enough to accept a bot verdict as
an oracle, it's just not possible.
There's one genre which could possibly work: Proof games or retros
where the preceding moves are all stipulated to have been made by a
bot, and the solver has full access to a bot during the test. The
number of people who would find such problems interesting would,
however, be extremely small.
On Sunday, May 8, 2022 at 1:54:23 PM UTC+1, Tim Chow wrote:
There's one genre which could possibly work: Proof games or retros
where the preceding moves are all stipulated to have been made by a
bot, and the solver has full access to a bot during the test. The
number of people who would find such problems interesting would,
however, be extremely small.
How small would the number be?
I would think either 0 or 1. It would depend on whether you would
find the problems interesting. If so, I'd guess 1. Otherwise, 0.
I like the way people's rankings would change as the technology changes. That's not a bug -- it's a feature.
It's no different to the way, we reassess how good the past work of writers and mathematicians was, depending on future developments.
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