On 1/9/2024 9:28 AM,
peps...@gmail.com wrote:
From a human standpoint, losing 0.088 equity on a cube decision
is consistent with being quite a strong player. I don't know the PR formulas exactly but I think it's possible to play at a 5 PR rating averaging one 0.09 error per game if other errors are minimized.
It is absolutely true that even the best players will occasionally
make mistakes that, according to the bot, lose a lot of equity.
Sometimes it is because of loss of concentration or carelessness,
but sometimes it's simply because the player's heuristics don't work.
This should not be surprising. In chess, for example, we know that
even the best players will occasionally blunder in the eyes of the
chess engines. For example, there was an endgame in the Carlsen-Caruana
world championship match a few years ago in which both players missed
a win that the computer found. There was just no way a human could
find that win over the board (without being told that there is a win,
of course).
Despite this, I find that countless players make the mistake of
conflating an "easy decision for a human" with a "large equity
difference according to the computer." I corresponded with James Vogl
about his excellent book, "Backgammon Super Genius Quiz," and he was
of the opinion that the only way to discriminate between top players
in a quiz would be to include positions with small equity differences.
This simply isn't true, as the Othello Quiz demonstrates year after
year.
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Tim Chow
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