Quote:
Originally Posted by amulet
In the older snowie a top pro could break even or even slightly beat it over a short session. Human's lose much of their cognitive abilities quickly. After let's say an hour, snowie would be better.
I assume the newest version of snowie is superior. Therefore, I think it would be impossible for a human to beat it long term.
I am interested in Bill's thoughts on short sessions vs the latest version of snowie.
I think Snowie 4 is a favorite over any human in short sessions and a bigger favorite in long sessions, for the reasons you stated.
I'm using "favorite" here in the sense that Hallberg did, namely that Snowie's error rate is lower than any human's in normal backgammon.
There's a separate issue being discussed here, namely whether there are trick positions which, if you can get Snowie into them, will enable you to get a very big cube where you're a huge favorite. That was easily doable against early versions of Jellyfish in positions where one side got all his men back, hit a checker in the bearoff, and then built an outer-board prime. JF evaluated his position as being a 90% favorite when he was in fact about an 85-15 underdog, so the cube would reach his limit (128) very quickly. You could reach these positions about 1 time in 15 or 20, giving you a huge edge overall. The JF people made an ad hoc fix in JF 3.0 by not letting the cube get above 4 or 8 in such positions.
I've looked at a bunch of such positions in Snowie 4 and it seems to evaluate them more or less correctly. However, at least a couple of people here claim that such positions exist, and I assume they wouldn't be willing to wager serious money unless they knew what they were talking about. But as of now I don't know what these positions look like. If I find out, I'll post one here.