(no subject)
Halko
where you can find when the upcoming tournaments are? The only thing I've been able
to find is past results of tournaments. Any help would be appreciated.
Peter Fankhauser
Peter Fankhauser
Peter Fankhauser
as some of you may remember, the distribution of the JellyFish
Rollouts for the postions in Bill Robertie's "Advanced
Backgammon" has been a somewhat sour subject with Bill Robertie.
Before distributing them, I tried to get permission from
Robertie, did not get it (was kind of a harsh reply). Next I
tried to get permission for distributing them WITHOUT position
diagrams, did not recieve any response, so I simply went ahead,
and distributed them in a form that can only be used with
Robertie's book.
I had thought that this was that. Well, wasn't. Now I got
a letter from Gammon Press (signed by Robertie) with my 65$
for the 1996 subscription of Inside Backgammon enclosed, and
the statement that Robertie refuses to have me as a customer.
(this was surprising insofar, that with the last issue in 95 I
had received a flyer with RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NOW! -
which I did ...)
Some parts of the letter are quite insulting, other parts are simply
plain wrong:
Robertie says that the web-page via which the jellyfish rollouts are
available
(http://este.darmstadt.gmd.de:5000/persons/fankhaus/robjf.html) leaves
the impression that Jellyfish's rollout results are simply correct and,
by implication, that "Advanced Backgammon" is hopelessly flawed.
I can't follow this interpretation.
The web-page does state that the rollouts
should not be trusted blindly, and it gives some reasons why they may
be misleading (of course these may not be exhaustive). With no word the
web-page states or implies that "Advanced Backgammon" is plain wrong.
How could it? The appendices and statistics of the distribution show
some significant agreement between Robertie and the rollout results.
True, for some positions Robertie IS plain wrong (think for example of
postion #142 - "Black's 4 is forced - 6/2" - ugh!), but those positions
never have been in the focus of that rollout project, and the web-page
does not mention any of these. So if not obvious from the web-page, I'd
like to state here that I regard "Advanced Backgammon" as one of the most
valuable books in my bg-library (luckily I purchased that before
Robertie's ban...), just with the rollouts to compare with I regard it
as even more valuable.
Robertie concludes his letter with expressing his contempt for
people like myself, who, unable to produce original and interesting
work on their own, try to make a name of themselves by
trampling on and trashing the work of others. I don't get this.
Firstly, I do not see how these rollouts trash Robertie's work. On the
contrary, because I highly estimate his work, I think that his
collection of positions provides an ideal benchmark for
investigating the particular strengths and weaknesses of JellyFish.
In addition, I think that - especially for the positions
where Robertie and JellyFish agree - it is worthwhile to have
explicit equities available for improving ones cube action, or
getting a better feeling for the gammonishness of certain styles
of play.
Secondly, I don't see how I could have tried to make a name of myself
with such a project. Anybody can do rollouts with Jellyfish, anybody
can type in about a 1000 positions alltogether, anybody can write the
awk-scripts to verify them and to put them into some readable format,
anybody can produce indices. It's just, some fibsers and I did the
work, because we were interested in the results, and when we had them,
we found them useful enough to make them publically available. To avoid
any suspect of fraud or the like I put my name under the preface, and
listed those contributors that did not prefer to stay anonymous (now I
understand why).
IMHO Robertie's reaction is out of sync, to say the least.
Peter Fankhauser
PS.: Does anybody know about another distributor of Inside Backgammon?