Quote:
Originally Posted by Robertie
If you spend your time instead fiddling with external dice generators and compiling elaborate statistics -- well, that's time wasted when you could have been studying something useful.
With respect, it's peace of mind.
In 1983 (this is the UK I'm talking about) I was playing Psion Backgammon on the ZX Spectrum. Back in those days, you could buy disassemblers that would reverse engineer the code behind the game; if you could understand assembly language (I could) then you could see what was going on in the code.
Guess what? I found exactly where it was cheating.
Fast forward 20 years and I found a very good Backgammon program for the pc which seemed to enjoy a lot of luck with the rolls. The guy behind the program was adamant that the random seed was dictated by the system date/time.
So it was child's play to write a batch file that reset the date/time to a certain value before calling the program and, voila, the rolls were the same for each game.......except, the computer's rolls varied depending on the board position. I could play a game in a certain fashion and note the dice rolls......shut the program down, fire it back up again via the batch file and replay it but make slightly different moves at certain times and laugh as the cheating kicked in.
The guy tried to wriggle by saying that if the cpu evaluated two rolls identically, it used the random number generator to decide which play to make. Except, that policy should have advanced the rolls by one, not rolled itself 6-6.
Long story short, if I use my own DLL to roll the dice, I know the dice are real.
You probably need to have been exposed to cheating programs; I can guarantee your outlook on backgammon programs would be very different.
Just because ExtremeGammon and GnuGB allegedly don't cheat doesn't mean that all backgammon programs are honest.