🚀 go-pugleaf

Actually, I have a theory about this.  I'm not "in the know" about this - I
don't know the people who put TD-GAMMON together - but I have noticed the
rather blatant appearance of cheating (program has three unprotected pieces,
only way I *won't* hit it at least once is if I roll a 1 2, and guess what I
roll).  My theory is that this is a game that was trained via massive
reiteration of playing against itself.  During the course of that learning,
it also "learned" the pattern to the pseudo-random numbers used to generate
the die rolls.  I understand that they probably change the seed from game to
game, but depending upon the quality of the random-number generator, there can
still be a repeating pattern, and that pattern might be built into the neural
net (or whatever other algorithm is being used) that drives the computer play.

In article <33014410.20749346@NewsServer.cc.monash.edu.au>,
David Zuidema <David.Zuidema@sci.monash.edu.au> wrote:
>On 11 Feb 97 18:44:51 -0500, dantonio@process.com (David D'Antonio)
>wrote:
>
>>In article <01bc182f$5ab0d880$132ee926@dlane>, DLane@ContactPt.com says...
>>>
>>>Is a version that will work with Warp 3 available?
>>>
>>>Anybody know?
>>
>>The version that one could get for fee from IBM's ftp server works fine
>>under Warp 3 FP17. Actually, that's no quite true as the colour of the
>>pieces got wierd with the ATI MACH64 drivers I was using.
>>
>>Oh and there was alot of net speculation that the damn thing cheats! I'm
>>not a backgammon slouch but it could trash me consistently. And it always
>>seemed to get the die rolls it needed to cover an otherwise vulnerable
>>position...
>
>I'm glad that someone else thinks the die rolls were too good to be
>true ! I thought I was going paranoid. :-)
>
>________________________________________
>David Zuidema                
>http://www.physics.monash.edu.au/~davidz
>


-- 
Jim Babka         babka@austin.ibm.com (Internet), BABKA at AUSTIN (VM)
AIX Kernel Service and Support                     USIB6UKS at IBMMAIL
What my employer thinks about what I say is best left unprinted...
  If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize