lol i know this sounds crazy, but has anyone else noticed that their Gnu program seems to be way above expectation in your games?

I mean i simply can't imagine the designers programming this in but i am really beginning to wonder.

My sample size is about 300 games and it just seems that the program hits joker after joker, perfect roll after perfect roll, and i am getting the opposite.

I am not that familiar with the program ( i am using the free download) - is it possible that i have some weird configuration set that causes this?

I am an 1800 online player, have been playing for 30 years and yes, i understand that bg is a game of suckouts, etc. But i mean this program is running like 5 times above ex.

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

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

Edit: This reminds me of a lot of online poker players who complain about the "frequency" of the bad beats. Basically, because you get so many more games in such a short period of time, your brain can be tricked into thinking it's happening "more often" (because it is in a temporal sense, but not relative to the number of trials).

Gnu will let you input hand-rolled dice if you want.

Humbling, isn't it?

If you have never played against Snowie, XG or GNUBG, getting your behind spanked by 2150 player will start you to scratching your head! I hope you have set GNUBG options to play World Class or Supremo. The default settings are similar to some of the GNUBG-based bots on FIBS, and (believe it or not) they are easier opponents than a 2-ply GNUBG.

The makers of the game say to look at the open source, and all, but I can't help but feel the thing cheats anyway.

How many times do you hit every open checker on the board within two or three moves?
How often does Gnu?

How often do you build a five or six prime within four or five moves?
How often does Gnu?

How often do you roll 66 when you've been hit and that point is blocked?
How often does Gnu?

How often do you double and immediately roll a 66 or some other perfect number?
How often does Gnu?

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Those things do happen in play against a human, but it does not happen in the majority of games day after day after day....Unless you're playing against Gnu.

I'm not talking about gettin hit, etc. because Gnu has skillfully set up his checkers; I'm talking about rolls that defy the odds on a regular basis.

It's apparent cheating seems to come in spells...like it turns on or off it's "cheat mode" at will. When it's not cheating, I usually kick it's butt. When it is cheating, the game is so outrageousely unbalanced that it's not even worth playing.

I've said it once before: Don't try to convince me the SOB doesn't cheat.

If you're not willing to listen to anyone else's arguments, why should anyone listen to yours?

I wrote those examples hoping somebody (or a few) would say, "Yeah! I've noticed all that stuff (and more), myself!"

I guess I'm kinda looking for confirmation. My FEELING is that it cheats, and "Don't try to convince me..." is really just an emotional outburst....and a challenge I would welcome. Deep inside, I'd like to be proven wrong, but with all I've seen that thing do, I don't know what could convince me! (BTW: I also stated on this forum that I sometimes argue when I very well know I could be wrong, because it's an efficient way to learn.----Oh, hey: That's called "playing devil's advocate," ain't it!? )

My mind is in conflict with my feelings. How could the makers invite people to examine the open source code if it cheats? Why would it be programmed to cheat? (....Uhm....So the makers could brag about how "great" Gnu is?)

So, don't try to convince me the SOB doesn't cheat! I dare you!

Edit:
Oh, yeah....And don't ask me to read that open source code. I wouldn't know what I was looking at or even if I had it right side up or upside down!

I was mostly teasing. But to address your questions a little more seriously, why not try the following test:

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.

It's most likely just psychology. You notice the suckouts much more than the times where it misses.

I cannot confirm your feelings. I've played about 600 games with GNUBG and had about average luck against it.

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.

Fantastic post. Good luck.

Hi,

i am also an 1800 player. 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.

greetings k.

Gnu is better than me too.

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.

Aaron:
I don't know how to do that reroll thing. I'll look into it. I'll figger it out.

You other guys:
I'll look into that game analysis thing, too.

I'll try using the manual dice, too, also, as well. (Was that repeatedly redundant?)

But don't be lookin' for a report from me anytime soon. I'm in the middle of remodeling due to a damaging water leak.

It's not hard. Just click back to the previous roll and I think it's in one of the menus ("Play computer roll" or something like that). If you can't find that, just go back to your previous play by clicking it in the game history and make the same play again.

Try to look in this way (and then burn every thoughts in this way, because they will leave you in muddy waters):

Cheating is a human qualitiy. Cheating has always a goal. But the only goal bots have, is to maximize the equity for the given roll to play. A build in function for cheating must produce a significant pattern, easy to see in an analysis.
When i remember right, but i don't know names, i just heard the story one time, years ago, perhaps someone can tell more, there was a backgammonserver, and someone cracked the dice generator, so he knew the upcoming dicies. He was caught, because someone noticed, that he made from time to time not the best move, but the best one according to the upcoming dices.

No one serious has seen anything in this direction for the bots. The bots are trustable for research. Any cheating would give them a bias, and no one serious would work with them. Can we end now and foerever the cheating feature?

Well, re my op, i am not alleging that there is a cheat factor built in to GNU - i mean, i just can't imagine it.

The purpose for my post was to see if anyone else was experiencing a similarly huge gnu +ex over a large sample like mine.

I was not aware of the "luck rating" feature in the analysis and i am presently running another 300 game sample where i will track the results on a spreadsheet - vs the estimate/steno pad tracking i was doing with my earlier sample.

Again, i really hated my sky id falling op, i am well aware of variance, odds etc, i have been playing card games and board games for decades, proficient and comfy with math;

the thing about my 300 game run was just so bizarre, it seemingly defied likely probability and i was just wondering if there was something to it.

Thanks for input all. Cheers.




Having said that tho - online poker is definitely rigged; especially pokerstars.

LOL!

GNUBg is likely to have an edge against all humans. GNUBg is will have a considerale edge against anyone who think it cheats. What is your average error rate ? How much of an edge did GNUBg have against you over 300 games according to the numbers ? Numbers, CIs ?

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.

By the way if you go to cell B4 and enter a spacebar entry from keyboard and then press enter the entire column A is recalculated and you have a new sequence.

Create as many such files you like.

Then go to GNU and in settings , options , dice , select read from file. Then it will prompt you to select the file so go where you saved the dice1.csv and select it.

From now on all the dice is taken from this file and you can actually observe that this is true for verification. In fact you can take a look at the file after 100 rolls and still see the sequence you saved so that it doesnt turn back on creating its own rolls later . Of course you shouldnt be looking at the sequence for other than test purposes because you then are the one cheating by knowing what will come. In any case now you have an external source of dice and no more a possible claim of cheating. Play this way and see if you have the same feelings of frustration that we all get when graded by this "sob" lol program at 1800 or 1750 or 1950 that then has the "audacity" to always claim we are always luckier (if you see the luck estimation) when we win a 17 point match every once in a while (say 40% of the time for me).


It sure feels very tilting at times but i guess its the nature of the streaks and how severe they prove when your pieces are not optimally placed to begin with . Basically what happens i think is that we make errors in placing pieces that improve slightly the probability to get hit and also if we then get unlucky to not enter in ridiculous spots of 3 openings or even 4 openings adn for the computer to start forming blots fast as well for the entire game to collapse. What i am saying is that the computer program plays in such a way as to maximally capitalize good luck for itself and bad for us. This in effect produces the impression that it is luckier because it gets what it wants more often and it feels highly convenient. Of course to be truly objective one has to study what it needs to get and see that it places itself in such a manner for typically the higher probability of good outcomes to emerge after every event of critical importance. It has managed to play in ways that allow it higher probability for good things in the future to happen. Just pay attention to detail and see what i mean.

I recall hearing that, back in the day when it was more difficult to generate long sequences of random numbers, certain publishers of books of sequences of random numbers would "adjust" their sequences as they seemed to follow patterns and, therefore, seemed not to be random when, in fact, they were. The human mind is good at finding patterns, even when they do not exist. Many players of roulette, lotteries and other games of chance will insist that they have observed a pattern that they can exploit.

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.

The feeling that electronically generated dice, whether from bots or online servers, are somehow cheating or not correct is extremely common, and virtually always unfounded. (I know of one proven exception). There is something about the human mind that seems to attribute the jokers and antijokers in an electronic format to cheating, when the same rolls or sequences of rolls with real dice are readily accepted as just "bad luck" or "good luck". And if you play live much at all you will see the same sort of things happen with real dice.

Even for those of us that understand something about the behavior of random numbers it is hard to shake the feeling that something is amiss when you get some of these sequences. I know I find myself, particularly playing on line, mumbling things like "unbelievable, "happens every %^&* time" etc. when my opponent does something like rolls the one double that brings them off bar against a 5 point board and hits my blot all at once, or seems to roll the 1 in 18 shot multiple times in a match. But those are emotional responses to the situation coupled with selective memory, and I realize that in the long run it is just the nature of the game, and it happens in live play all the time as well. Somehow, we just don't seem to jump to the "cheating" conclusion in live play like we do with generated dice.

Full tilt is currently allowing a cheater to prosper on the 6 handed .25/.50 PLO game... I've reported it twice... in the last 3 hours, player SEEKPLAYER has managed to CONTINOUSLY hit 4 outer gut shots against set after set, top two pair and much more. I have NEVER seen ridiculous playing like I am seeing right now on Full Tilt! I have demanded my money back or I am NEVER playing on this site again.

Cheating for sure! Nobody ever makes top two or a set in PLO.