The title says it all – this thread is for anyone who wants to see the world’s best bot grow even better in the future. I have some ideas and maybe you do too, in which case I hope you’ll share them here.

1. Learning Lab

Since BG is a game of pattern recognition, the trick to getting better is to repeatedly see those patterns you don't understand, in a way which keeps you involved and interested. Dissecting the corpse of a dead game, wincing at the brainless horrors XG accuses you of in angry crimson and reproving green, is a slow and demoralising way to improve, and reminds me of the way I was taught Latin as a schoolboy. Instead of pointing out failure, how about rewarding success, like this:

XG Learning Lab stores all your bad plays, both with checkers and the cube, in its own special database. Your task is now to clear them from its memory by getting them right next time. Whenever you decide to go into Lab Mode, XGL calls up the positions randomly one by one, and asks you for your move or your decision. Get it correct, and XGL chalks you up a brownie-point. Get it wrong again, and you can be sure the position will appear a lot in future. Once you have finally made a good choice three times running (or however many times you specify), over whatever timescale it might take you to achieve this (minutes for an expert, months for a beginner) then your misplay is considered rectified and erased.

This would become an addictive game in its own right – purge yourself of all your past backgammon sins and a victory-screen appears, along with a small synthetic fanfare... : - ) Additionally, XGLL would score your results in both PR and elo, and also graph your progress over the long-term, just the way it already does with ordinary games.

2. Openings Trainer

XG2 already contains the most definitive openings database in existence. At the moment it is mainly an exercise in geekery, its contents known only to a few high priests of the game. However the information could easily be disseminated in a way that is educational and useful. The principle is exactly the same as for the Learning Lab, namely guidance through stimulus and reward, but here the aim is to play all the opening rolls and replies perfectly, either for money-play or tournament or both.

The program will soon believe you know how to play an opening 3:1, and will subsequently never ask you this again, but 6:4s and 2:1s et al at different match-scores, and your best reply when you roll second, would again take anything from minutes to months to master, depending on your standard.


3. CubeSky

Extreme Gammon knows everything there is to know about the cube, yet teaches nothing on the subject whatsoever. Piles of numbers to two decimal places are not a form of enlightenment. Imagine instead the market window as the archetypal child’s window, a square with four equal panes. Through the window you see rain below the horizontal crossbar and blue sky above it. Plotted along the skyline is the past course of your game, with the move currently under question being the sun.

Say it’s the first roll of the game, so the sun is still on the far left of the window. You’re down 7-away 2-away, so the sun has appeared far higher in the sky than usual. Three rolls in and you’ve had nice dice, your opponent hasn’t. Maybe the sun is already on the window-bar, neither stuck in the rain nor overshooting into the clear blue sky, making this a perfect double. But now click the mouse and CubeSky will auto-scroll through all other scores, as quickly or as slowly as you like. Had you been up 7/2 instead of down, for example, the sun would barely scrape above the windowsill, making that same perfect double a hideous blunder, with the sun exploding into supernova in the blackest part of the raincloud.

This extreme example would only help a beginner, obviously, but it would help him enormously. Going further up the rankings, surely any player would love to know whether, for instance, the mistake they made when one point down would have been correct at level-score, or if the cube had still been in the centre. Regardless of experience and ability, who wouldn’t want to see striking visual proof of the cube’s dynamics, alongside the numerical evidence? And if you want to make CubeSky a learning game as well, plug in your own estimates of winning and gammon chances of past correct decisions taken by XG, and see how the vista changes before it reveals the true picture; the better your guesses, the higher your score.



People learn through sights and sounds, not stats. If you agree, and would like to see XG develop into a fabulous teaching aid, then you need to say so or it will never happen. The developer is brilliant at what he does, is receptive to ideas and listens to his customers, but all that only works if people tell him what they want.

Hear, hear. Why not post this to GNUBG developers as well, or is that because they appear not to be as receptive to new ideas (maybe they are, who am I to tell)?

well, XG is where it's at, so either Xavier does it or nobody will. Mind you, he's a member of this forum, so if he sees sufficient demand from us plebs below 2000, then we might be in luck. XG is a commercial product, after all, so it would make commercial sense. But if there's little response to these ideas, I expect he'll do no more than carry on micro-tweaking, eking out a couple more superfluous elo points of program strength to please the likes of Stick and Neil Kazaross.

Love ideas 1 & 2, not sure if I understand 3 100% but more features the better.

Post this on bgonline.org, Xavier always goes there.

Of what I understand, it would be a graphical representation of the doubling window, the sun being your current equity.

yup, the horizontal beam across the middle of the window represents the optimum time to offer a double, and this beam magically gets fatter or thinner according to the early/late cost ratio associated with the score and current level of the cube. The type of cloud shows whether it's a pass or a take. Idea #3 would only be of moderate value to moneyplayers, but would really come into its own for those of us who prefer matches.

Here is something that would be revolutionary: a rollout bank stored in the cloud.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...ogram-1103373/

Mac OS X support

Thanks for the advice to post this on bgonline - I've just done so. The Fritz cloud thing is amazing and has given me another idea, which I've outlined over there.

I just would like to add that I certainly won't upgrade to XG3 if it is only a 'micro-tweaked' version of XG2, and would like to thank lost in transit for the initiative.

Thanks Asinus, but I'm afraid it's hopeless. Xavier would only react if he saw a demand, and the degree of invention shown by the good folk over at bgonline would easily be beaten by a row of cabbages. On the upside though, I'm sure the next version of XG will include all sorts of pointless fiddly new things to make the geeks swoon with delight...

btw, if anyone wanna study the opening book you can find it here

It doesn't have scorebased responses, so I think there are many of the "high priests", that have more complete opening databases of their own.

These are interesting ideas that would be good for drawing people into backgammon who might be curious, but as far as learning beyond the basics, I'm not sure that it's really moving in the right direction.

The problem to me seems that the positions are very scatter-shot and you won't really "learn" much about the positions that you're getting right or wrong. The game is too complex and subtle for a program like this to do anything but help the weakest of players. Imagine learning chess from one of the so-and-so teaches chess line. Anyone who learns chess from this may be able to beat a beginner, but I don't think anyone who learns chess from such a program would really expect to be a strong chess player by the time they're done. (I could be wrong. I haven't actually tried learning chess from one of those programs.)

I think a better idea (that doesn't even need to wait for XG's next version) would be a library program.
* Store positions and analyses of positions
* Import positions/errors/analyses from matches
* Allow user-defined tags for positions
* Allow browsing by tag
* Create quizzes based on tags

I think something like this would be a relatively simple program to create, and would do a lot more for teaching backgammon players than making a meta-game out of it.

Edit: The cloud idea is pretty interesting. After not too much time, I think common positions within the first dozen moves would be analyzed to a medium depth.

Well, I didn't learn the rules until I was 50, so I'm never going to be seriously good. But I've put on 380 elo since buying XG, and it currently grades my skill level at 2014. I've got better, tortuously slowly, by going through my blunders and sussing out why XG's move is better. The answers are often beautiful, and that's where I derive my pleasure from the game, as my nerves make me a hopeless competitor when playing a real person.

So, I'm not quite a beginner anymore. But I still maintain my ideas would help. Why? Well, idea 1 would enable me to play the opening rolls perfectly inside a week. Without it, I never will. Idea 2 would mean that the mistakes I've made, examined and understood would not then promptly be lost in a great ocean of past blunders, but would be readily available. The most elementary tenet of education is that you learn through repetition and familiarity, not from a one-time eureka moment. Idea 3 I'll let pass, because if I can't convince you the first two are worthwhile, I certainly won't convince you of something that can only be demonstrated visually! One thing I do know though - if these ideas were implemented I'd be 2150 in two years. Without them, it will probably take me longer than I have left, or brain-rot will set in first.

By the way, your own idea already exists. It's called checkerplay.com. Virtually nobody uses it - it would take an age to upload all your blunders to it. Idea 2 is essentially to give XG users their own streamlined automated checkerplay.com

Interesting. I've never heard of it. I think it would be better for players to be able to do this to their own positions. It works better in the memory and understanding department to pick at their own positions rather than going online to look at positions that they've never seen before. The "I remember this position" lightbulb has value.

After looking at that site, I can see why it's not used by that many people. It's not well-organized.

I guess I didn't really read it like that. I read it more like you were creating gimmicky meta-games to play. But I'm also of the mentality that those sorts of things don't necessarily promote learning. I would wager that you're much better at backgammon as a result of your careful review than you ever would have been by playing the meta-games you've proposed.