So when you beat GNU, it's playing honestly, but when it beats you, it must be cheating?

Thanks for mentioning that you are highly rated on playok.com. You didn’t say, however, how many ABT (American Backgammon Tour) events you won last year. Perhaps none, but only because you play in Europe. So, how many World Backgammon Association tournaments was it that you won last year? Oh, none. But Monte Carlo is not a WBA event, and you did win that last year, right? No? Well maybe you’re kicking butt over at GridGammon. You must have winning record against Mochy, Neil, Falafel, Stick, Nack, Sander, Senk, Robertie and all the other giants. I confess, however, I did search the Giants of Backgammon listings, and I could not find any player named GnuCheats2.

So, what about this thread? There are at least ten ideas posted here for checking whether your bot cheats. By now, you must have tried half of them. Praytell, what did you learn?

Aaron W: How have you determined that the program is running hot? Do you keep stats on things like the luck rating and such?

Aaron W: GNU is open source, and so if you are inclined you can actually read through the source code to see the dice algorithms.

2/325Falcon: Gnu will let you input hand-rolled dice if you want.

Aaron W: In some spot where you feel that GNU hit some super joker against you or you roll an anti-joker, go back and roll it again. Roll the dice from that same position a couple hundred times and keep track of the distribution of rolls (exclude the first one so that the joker/anti-joker will not bias the sample by always seeding the first sample with a hit).

Repeat this in a few dozen other positions that you happen to bump into while playing GNU.

Report the findings.

WeirdChess1: Note that you can look up "luck" ratings in GNU. It will tell you how many rolls it's getting that are very lucky, lucky, unlucky, and very unlucky, and same for you, along with a luck rating. Just check match or session statistics.

Kruidenbuiltje: My experience is that with gnu both sides are equally lucky. I play and analyze a lot of games on the grandmaster level, and I ussually understand the reasons why i lost. Sometimes its because of luck, but most of the times it is because i played to risky or to safe.
I think the best advice is to analyse your games and look at the moves marked lucky and unlucky and see if they are rather equally spread between you and gnu.

RealNick: Have any of you in the "gnu cheats" crowd ever evaluated your error rate and luck rating?

Both are readily found under analyze in the menu bar.

Take your error rate and luck rating and keep a spreadsheet, keeping a average. I think if you take the time and effort to do this you will realize that it's not so much gnu cheating as it's taking advantage of your mistakes.

Masque de Z: Its all very simple really. Just go to excel and create a file dice1.txt or dice1.csv by basically creating a column that has the form on cell A1;

+INT(RAND()*6)+1

then copy this cell and paste on the entire column of A from A2 to A10000 say.

Now you have a column of 10000 rnd dice rolls. Save the file as say dice1.csv (select csv format) and answer yes to all questions. [more follows]

Big Will: Keep in mind that if tell GNU to read from a given file, every time you start a new GNU session it is going to start from the top of the file, so you will get the same sequence of rolls unless you tell it to use another file.

You can also have gnu get dice rolls from random.org, which bypass the dice PRNG and downloads a set of numbers form random.org. I am not sure that you can see what it fetched from random.org however, so if you are in the gnubg cheats crowd you might still claim it manipulated the numbers. You could also use random.org yourself to created a set of truly random number in a file like the excel method above, but the PRNG in excel I am sure is good enough for generating dice rolls.

Taper_Mike: For your consideration:

How to Prove Your Bot Doesn't Cheat
by Bill Robertie

This last one from Robertie is a good one. How did it work out for you?

All sarcasm aside, now we know the truth. You have never won even one major tournament, and you are too lazy to try any of the foregoing tests.

Jeez! Aren’t you embarrassed? At the very least, you might try getting out your dice cup, and rolling the dice manually against GNUBG for a couple of weeks. Those who have report here that it slows them down just enough so that they think out their moves better, and get better results. What they do not report, however, is that their bot cheats.

I have never met a single player who both has a game I respect, and who asserts that any major bot (Snowie, GnuBg, XG) cheats.

I don’t know; maybe you’re the first. Just in case, repeat after me:

Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.
Even though I am a good player, against GNUBG, I am a fish.

(Don’t stop!)

I've played against GNU enough to predict the dice it will use to win more than half the time. I couldn't be arsed to write a book about why I know GNU cheats on Grandmaster; neither does it bother me anymore as I stopped playing GNU as I'm having much more fun playing on PlayOK. Some are better than me, some are not, but I know if I lose that no one's cheating (with the exception of botters). A user on playok beat me 6 consecutive times and I can easily tell he was all game. I have no problem calling a spade a spade, but I can't trust GNU. If you can prove that GNU doesn't cheat, I'll take your word for it.

I've tried manual dice and GNU doesn't cheat anymore. That's all the proof I need.

How many times have you played against GNU on grandmaster?

And if you're up for it, I'll challenge you on playok.

Yes. Most of the time. Try going up 6-0 (out of 7) against Grandmaster and you'll see what I mean; that's when it usually switches on bot mode. It's way too obvious not to notice. I mean, the rolls on GNU are not merely lucky, but LAUGHABLE.

World-class human players play against bots all the time for practice. I've never met one who thinks the bots were cheating. Do you suppose this is because they are

(a) too dumb to see

(b) too unobservant to notice

(c) a and b together, or

(d) some other reason.

Just curious. By the way, how do you do when you play top human opposition in tournaments? Do they cheat you as well?

This has to be a level.......

Nope. I don't invest enough ego into a board game which could alter my perception to the point of delusions. In fact, I love playing against better players for practice. I downloaded GNU for practice alone, but can't say that it's helped me much at all, because I feel robbed of challenge when I get 3 times the chance of rolls such as 6x6 when the 6 slot's the only block - and it happens again and again and again. I don't notice being cheated against better players for I never get 5+ doubles in a row, all of which are blocked. The dice in GNU ruins the point of the game. Sorry, I find it difficult to trust a computer program unless I see proof that it works.


I digress, though. All things are possible... I just thought I'd point out a fallacy I noticed. I might even be a bit of a schizo...

Could you describe what such a proof would look like?

Wow. The guy is arguably a troll and has flipped back the burden of the proof. Now WE have to prove that it is NOT rigged. Wow.

He who makes the assertion carries the burden of proof.
— [Source unknown]

If you enter a public forum, and make claims — without any proof — that challenge generally accepted facts or theories, you should not be surprised when your statements are treated with scorn. You may even be right, of course, but without proof, you cannot expect to be taken seriously.

As a for-instance, consider the case of Albert Einstein, and his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein claimed that Newton’s theory of gravity, widely accepted since its publication in the 1680s, was wrong. By 1919, Einstein’s new theory had been around for a couple of years, but had not been broadly accepted by the scientific community. Then, on May 29, 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington made the famous eclispe photographs that provided evidence that light bends in a gravitational field exactly as General Relativity predicts. Almost overnight, Einstein — who was already famous among physicists — became the superstar that he is today. Proof was the ticket.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the flat-Earthers. Yes, they are still around. But if you go down to the public square, and begin shouting — without any evidence — that the earth is flat, people will treat you like a kook. And they should.

As to the claim that bots cheat, no fewer that ten suggestions have been given to you as to how you might gather evidence to prove or disprove your assertion. Yet, the best you can do is tell us that is our job to prove that bots do not cheat. I must warn you, you are treading in a field where the generally accepted wisdom is that bots do not cheat. And you are sounding much more like a flat-Earth kook than Albert Einstein.

Although a bit out of date, you may find this Software Complaint Form to be entertaining, if not useful:

Backgammon Galore!
Software Complaint Form
by Gary Wong
http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+546

<useless-brag>
My former boss' father used to have Einstein as one of his professors (physics).
</useless-brag>

If you think Gnu cheats then don't use it.

Bill, please close this thread and lets get back to talking about backgammon.