On 03/08/2013 4:39 PM, christophe...@gmail.com wrote:opening a discussion of whether this exists or doesn't exist. I'm not going there again. I would like to hear from people who have played there or in other arenas or have worked in online gaming. Thanks in advance,chris
Anybody playing Backgammon Live or the new incarnation of Play65,PlayGem Social?
Some of us find that the games must be being manipulated by the developers and or admins.It is pretty blatant stuff. Multiple doubles again and again,game after game. Anybody have any knowledge of this kind of manipulation? I'm not interested in
I am a developer of GNUBG ( www.gnubg.org ), and have written code for
years that generate dice and randomized card deals. Is it possible for a developer to write bad routines to generate dice? Yes it is, however
there are so many well known and well tested pseudo random generators
that are indistinguishable from real randomness that you can't tell them apart.
On a pay site in theory developers could keep the fish playing by
altering the dice to favour the weaker player just to keep them from
leaving the site (and I believe that was suggested in many forums) yet
there was never any concrete evidence of it (that I saw), but it could happen if the business has no scruples. Some businesses don't. So when
it comes to real money play you take your chances.
You bring up a social game in the mix. Social sites have less incentive
to have doubles. If a social site appears to have too many doubles in
your opinion, it is probably more than likely that the rolls are good.
In fact some sites actually realize that random dice don't make it a fun game, so they bias the generator against longer sequences or clusters of doubles.
One such case is Safeharborgames (www.safeharborgames.net). A number of years ago Neil Robbins discovered an issue on a small sample set of
matches on SHG. Will Womack and I collected hundreds of thousands of
rolls originally and discovered that Neil was correct. Safeharbor games
had placed a de-clustering algorithm on the rolls to help prevent longer sequences of doubles from appearing. The dice were random, but they no longer reflected the distribution expected from properly weighted 6
sided dice.
I played on this site for the better part of a year and wasn't aware
that there were too few doubles. What I should have picked up on though
was that on SHG there were far fewer people complaining about the dice.
The lack of complaints should have sent up a red flag.
SHG removed the de-cluster algorithm they were using and the statistical study of the dice after that (millions of rolls worth from actual
matches played) showed the dice were now fine. Unfortunately, it had the side effect that people now complained that there were too many doubles
and they would leave the site. To make a long story short SHG decided to appease their social player base and created red dice and yellow dice
rooms. Red dice rooms are the bastardized dice with fewer sequences of doubles (Mersenne Twister + de-cluster algorithm), and the yellow ones
are based on rolls generate by Mersenne Twister algorithm (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister ). If you wish to read
more about that saga and the user backlash Will Womack's blog is still aailable to read: http://backgammoncamp.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/safe-harbor-games-dice/ .
SHG is no longer alone, and thanks to Christopher Yep for contacting me
a couple days ago (I forgot to respond to him until I saw your post)
about another site who offer mobile Backgammon and they make it quite
clear that they too bastardize the dice. The product is FaceMe mobile backgammon: http://www.quatrian.com/FMBGFAQ.html . Read the section "How does the Random dice rolling algorithm work?". What they do is take a
random source and then apply a filter to it to reduce occurrences of clusters of doubles. This doesn't make the dice closer to real life
dice, it makes them much different in a statistically bad way.
On GNUBG (GNU Backgammon, a world class playing program) we make all our source code fully available (It is open source GLPv3). No one has yet
found in the code where the dice are manipulated when you use the normal dice options (GNUBG does offer a dice cheating option). Nor have they
found the code that looks ahead at a next roll to make a better decision
on the current roll. No one has found the code where the bot alters the
dice with normal dice options.
The real problem is that people's perception of what randomness looks
like or how many doubles should appear, or how many in a row you should
see is most often flawed. There are many articles on this, and then of course there is the gambler's fallacy etc.
About 15 years ago Gary Wong (the original author of GNUBG) wrote a complaint form for dice when there were very few online servers, but a
lot of people complaining. That form has been saved for posterity here: http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+546
I have studied the dice on a number of sites including Gridgammon, FIBS,
and Safeharbor games. Many tens of thousands of matches played by a
variety of people. The only sites I have studied that had dice issues
was SHG and its predecessor RenGamesOnline (which is now http://gamingsafari.com/ ). Both artificially manipulate the doubles to
make the game appear fairer. This doesn't mean these dice are correct
(and statistics can show it)
Dice can be fickle. The best we can do as players is to become more competent, make fewer error and maximize the luck we do get. But even if
we play our best, the dice can knock us on our ass and make us think "I
hate Backgammon" (see http://www.ihatebackgammon.com/ for the t-shirt).
--
Michael Petch
GNU Backgammon Maintainer / Developer
OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304
On Monday, October 6, 2014 4:39:33 PM UTC-4, lan...@gmail.com wrote:must pledge that every time you write down a prediction, it stays on the permanent record even if you end up being wrong.
Many times when I am in a critical position in the game and it is my opponent's roll, I say to myself "I bet I know what the next roll isThis would be interesting if you have written records to back it up. Instead of just "saying to yourself," write down your prediction in a log book. It counts only if the prediction is written down completely before the roll appears. Furthermore you
going to be" and sure enough I am right most of the time - a perfect roll either in my favor or my opponent's. The odds for the occurrence of such perfect rolls in critical positions defy the rules of probability.
I've never heard of anyone actually doing this, so I have to assume that you're just deluding yourself. I would love to be proved wrong, so please start such a log book and share the results after you have accumulated, say, 500 predictions.
On October 7, 2014 at 12:28:20 AM UTC+1, Tim Chow wrote:
.....
This reminds me of a really frustrating argument.....
"Ok, now he's going to roll 21 or 31". We then see a roll of 32. "Yes, or 32! or 32! The same type of roll as I said. You see I'm right!"
I was unbelievably frustrated by this argument.
Interesting. Not that you're likely to get into such an argument again,
but one possible tactic you could have tried would be to have the guy
state rolls that are *not* going to happen. If he says that a roll is definitely not going to happen and then it happens, that's harder to
weasel out of than if he predicts a particular roll and then a "similar"
roll happens.
Tim Chow
Can we flip that on its head? If I announce that the bot is going to roll x-y and it does (as many times as the developer chooses, 1, 10, 100, no difference to me), how does the developer of the program "weasel out of it"?
On 11/20/2022 11:36 AM, Nasti Chestikov wrote:
Can we flip that on its head? If I announce that the bot is going to roll x-y and it does (as many times as the developer chooses, 1, 10, 100, no difference to me), how does the developer of the program "weasel out of it"?I might answer that question if you tell me where you attended
law school.
---
Tim Chow
Anybody playing Backgammon Live or the new incarnation of Play65,PlayGem Social?opening a discussion of whether this exists or doesn't exist. I'm not going there again. I would like to hear from people who have played there or in other arenas or have worked in online gaming. Thanks in advance,chris
Some of us find that the games must be being manipulated by the developers and or admins.It is pretty blatant stuff. Multiple doubles again and again,game after game. Anybody have any knowledge of this kind of manipulation? I'm not interested in
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