I’m currently going through Robertie’s “501” and learning bundles from it - I much enjoy the pithy and cogent way the ideas are expressed. I want to put all the positions I get wrong into XG and study them that way, but I’ve hit a snag: no matter how many permutations I try of swap board / invert board / change active player / bear off left-or-right / fixed numbers / change-with-move etc., I simply can’t get XG to replicate the book’s format, with black’s checkers going clockwise from his 24-point at the top left corner. The nearest I’ve come is to have black’s back markers leap off the board in a single bound, a surprised expression on their face, glad to be spared the hassle of running round the block and facing all that irritating white opposition ...

I’m sure it’s easy if you know how - everything is easy if you know how - but whenever I swap the board, it maddeningly reverts to ‘white to play’ instead of black. Much as I like XG, the ergonomics of this feature leave a lot to be desired imo, as the various commands needed for set-up are all scattered in different places under different menus. If someone with a more deductive brain than me could list the precise command-order I need, I’d be greatly obliged.

Have you tried Options - Board Configuration, and then check the box "Invert Board"?

"A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. "

(Groucho Marx: 1895-1977)


Thanks for responding. Yes, indeed I have. Many , many times. There is no permutation of options I haven't attempted over and over and over: hence my post.

So you're saying it can be done? - that you yourself have successfully set up - and then actually played from - a position identical in format to the book, or are you just assuming that's it's possible?

If only it just needed CtrL:up-down-left-right-arrow, to flip the board up and down and left and right, without changing the colour of the player you've set on roll, and keeping the invert-fixed-change-with-move options selected in Board Configuration, then, if a child of five were unavailable, one could send for a child of three. Unfortunately though, programmers are just too damn smart to see how simple things can be.

In options board configuration set your checkers to black, opponents checkers to white.
Options Board Orientation Bearoff on left

Should work for you.

No harm in setting up the diagram with the Black checkers bearing off to the lower right. You'll get the same answers.

@ BigWill

Yay! thank you! 'my checkers: Pine. Opponent's checkers: Walnut'
-- that's the crucial bit I was missing. One-up to you, because it's something the guy who designed XG never mentioned when I asked him about this.

@ Robertie

With respect, entering hundreds of positions when things aren't exactly the same as the book would have been problem #502, and one I could do without.

Glad to be of help, you might want to checkout http://www-math.mit.edu/~tchow/rober...bertie501.html before you go get to far into this project. It has rollouts (GNU) for many of the positions, and particularly for those positions where the GNU rollouts (2 ply, variable lengths) differs from the answer given in the book.

mm - thanks again - but tbh I'm not too fussed if a bot has found a better move sometimes; it's the thought-processes of a top player which interest me. I want to put them in XG simply because it'll make me go slower, and because I'll be able to see what's going on better than in a dinky little diagram.

@BigWill

Sorry to doublepost but I was quite wrong, and clearly that link you gave is essential to study the book properly; without it, learners like me would get the wrong idea about an awful lot of positions.

btw, I've given up my idea of using XG, because its Position Set-Up function is a complete pig's ear, making you jump through a whole bunch of assinine hoops each and every time before it deigns to actually analyse something.

Really, I don't find the set-up position function in XG to be hard to use, not sure what your issue with it is.

The point-and-click system for setting up is beautifully elegant, yes; you can enter any position in 20 seconds or less. But that's where the beautiful elegance breaks down and asswittedness takes over. If you think having to tell it that Black is called ...er... black? and white goes by the name of.. um.. white, maybe? each and every time over hundreds and hundreds of diagrams is good design, then your idea of good design is very different from mine. To go from playing a game, to setting up a position, actually analysing and/or playing from it, and then returning to playing normally again, requires an insane number of clicks and scrolls and menus, not a single one of which would be needed if it had an action-memory or an elementary wizard asking you how you like things done in each of the two modes. It's a classic case of a programmer thinking like a programmer and not like a customer. But it's no big deal, and compared to Snowie or gnubg it's an absolute gem of a program.

There are a few ways to speed up some of this, although I agree that they are more work arounds and some of this could be improved. I don't think most people really have a problem with just leaving things as player1 and player2 for analysis, but it would have been nice to allow a permanent change to the default names.

For switching between playing and analyzing the quickest way to do this is to open two instances of the program at the same time. When you want to do more detailed analysis in the game you are playing a CTRL C in the game instance a click to the other instance and a Ctrl V will paste the position into the other instance in the set-up mode. You can then make changes to the position and run analysis from there. Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it certainly saves some clicks.

That's a very cunning plan. Hopefully the next update of XG won't require such cunningness.

I don't recall seeing much discussion of the set-up interface and connection to the rest of the program in the public discussion, but the developer is listening to the user base for making changes in version 2 so it would be worth sending him the input.

Yup, you're right - he is indeed receptive to good ideas, and I have a feeling the next version is going to be a cracker. As for the user base, it's up to us not only to suggest improvements, but to get the word out generally; it seems to me that XG is too much of a well-kept secret, with most people still talking as if the antiquated rip-off programs are the only ones available.

Depends on which forums you read, at bgonline XG is certainly the most popular bot, with gnu still getting a fair representation. Anything from Snowie is fairly rare and I don't think in the year I have been reading it I have heard anything other than an occasional historical reference about Jellyfish. Put it historic context I am not sure that it is fair to say that either JF or Snowie were originally "rip-offs" even though they were relatively expensive. But times have changed and those programs have fallen behind and I think anyone purchasing either of those programs today is certainly wasting money.

Fair enough - I think I'll take a look at bgonline.

Changing the subject entirely, does anyone want to buy my wind-up gramophone? It's the best hi fi in the world and I only want ten million dollars for it.