Leibowitz Coup Number One
Jean van Ingen
Rereading Kleinmann's Vision laughs.... I encountered at page 229 this
position:
X on roll
+24-23-22-21-20-19-------18-17-16-15-14-13-+
| O O | | |
| O | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| |BAR| |
| | | |
| | | |
| X X X | | |
| X X X X X | | |
| X X X X X X | | X |
+-1--2--3--4--5--6--------7--8--9-10-11-12-+
Men Off X: 0 O: 12
CubeValue: 2, X owns Cube
Kleinmann:
This is Leibowitz Coup Number One.
O, on shake says: "Roll. If you roll 2-1, I don't have to shake!"
Sure enough, x rolls 2-1. Leibowitz claims a gammon.
Are they so smart, or am I so stupid? What's the point?
BGtallrock
win, tails you lose..."
xx
position?
O only has a 1/6 chance of the gammon
"Jean van Ingen" <j.van...@worldonline.nl> wrote in message
news:94i6f7$313$1...@nereid.worldonline.nl...
Jive Dadson
point until only three of the opponent's checkers remained, all three on
the two point. The oppopent rolled something and an ace, bore a man
off, and grimly hit Hassan's straggler with the one, leaving blots on
the deuce and ace points.
Hassan rolled 6-6. Unperturbed, he picked up his checker from the bar,
waved it around the outer boards, flew it over his inner board -- and
bore it off!
Hassan's dazzled opponent duly scored up a single win for himself, no
gammon. If he had any curiosity about why the kibitzers were howling
with laughter, he managed to keep it to himself.
Jive
Walter Trice
cheater's ploy, presumably against a very tired or dazed opponent. The
'rational' thing to say would have been "Roll. If you DON'T roll 2-1 then I
don't have to shake."
--walter trice
"xx" <x...@x.com> wrote in message news:092b6.533$F%5.1...@news3.atl...
Nick Wedd
Walter Trice <walte...@worldnet.att.net> writes
>That's the point. Kleinman is illustrating a (marginally, imho) amusing
>cheater's ploy, presumably against a very tired or dazed opponent. The
>'rational' thing to say would have been "Roll. If you DON'T roll 2-1 then I
>don't have to shake."
I am still confused. Perhaps the problem is in these two lines from the
original posting:
>> > X on roll
>> > O, on shake says: "Roll. If you roll 2-1, I don't have to shake!"
Nick
--
Nick Wedd ni...@maproom.co.uk
Volsano
There is no easy way to enter an "Ascii Art" board position into any of the
backgammon playing programs I've seen. And I appreciate that writing a
suitable parser would be problematically as the Ascii art drawings do not
follow an exact standard.
So, in these days of human-mediated machine-to-machine communication, would it
not be possible for your programmes to export and read a compact board
notation? Something a bit like the Forsythe notation for a chess position.
A simple example of what might be possible:
<m/x4/o2222//o4/o4/o4/19/x/x5>
Meaning:
Money game.
X owns a 4 cube.
O has all of a double two to move.
No men on the bar.
O has four men each on his 1, 2 and 3 points.
X has one man on his 2 point and five on his 1 point.
I realize it'll take a while to thrash out all the details of such a notation.
But think of the benefits to us users! We could just copy and paste one line
into your programme for instant play or analysis.
Or is there already something like this, and I'm reinventing a wobbly wheel?
Al.
Gary Wong
> So, in these days of human-mediated machine-to-machine
> communication, would it not be possible for your programmes to
> export and read a compact board notation? Something a bit like the
> Forsythe notation for a chess position.
>
> A simple example of what might be possible:
>
> <m/x4/o2222//o4/o4/o4/19/x/x5>
>
> Meaning:
> Money game.
> X owns a 4 cube.
> O has all of a double two to move.
> No men on the bar.
> O has four men each on his 1, 2 and 3 points.
> X has one man on his 2 point and five on his 1 point.
There are a few schemes for recording positions that (I think) come close
to what you want. Jellyfish ".pos" files are perhaps the most widely
used; programs that handle it include Jellyfish (surprise!), the BBGT
FIBS client, BGBlitz, and GNU Backgammon. The format is documented at:
http://jelly.effect.no/fspec.htm
FIBS "boardstyle 3" output is nice and compact, and implicitly understood
by pretty much every FIBS client out there, although it's not currently
used as an external representation. The description is:
http://www.fibs.com/fibscmds.html#rawboard
GNU Backgammon uses a very short text string to describe a board position;
for instance, when running on a text terminal, it shows the position you
describe as:
GNU Backgammon Position ID: XwAAgPceAAAAAA
+12-11-10--9--8--7-------6--5--4--3--2--1-+ O: gnubg
| | | O O O | O Rolled 22
| | | O O O | O
| | | O O O | O
| | | O O O |
| | | |
^| |BAR| |
| | | X | X
| | | X | XX
| | | X | XX
| | | X | XX
| | | X X | XX
+13-14-15-16-17-18------19-20-21-22-23-24-+ X: gary (Cube: 4)
The "XwAAgPceAAAAAA" describes the chequer positions; the gnubg command
"set board XwAAgPceAAAAAA" will restore the above position. The position
ID format is documented at:
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~gary/backgammon/positionid.html
Position IDs do not include the cube value, match score, player names, etc.,
however; an extensible format for recording auxiliary information like that
is SGF (Smart Game Format):
and SGF for backgammon in particular:
http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/backgammon.html
Cheers,
Gary.
--
Gary Wong Consultant, Dependable Distributed Computing, AT&T Shannon Labs
g...@research.att.com http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~gary/