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Spreadsheet as BG Learning Aid Spreadsheet as BG Learning Aid

05-20-2016 , 06:19 PM
I have started listing my BG errors on a Spreadsheet as below - hope some of you find this useful.

1) Analyse games/matches from saved match files, I use GNUBG
2) Set your own 'bad move' threshold for equity loss and copy the GNUBG position ID when you made a bad move.
3) Paste ID to column 1 in the spreadsheet
4) In column 2 put the position type (holding game, bear off, etc.)
5) In column 3 put a decision type (break anchor, hit twice, etc)
6) In column 4 put the equity loss
After you have a sizable amount of data and have refined your descriptive categories, put a filter on the spreadsheet list. You can then review selected position types and/or decision types by using the filter. You can see which types of position lead to your biggest errors and work on them. For a particular position just copy and paste the position ID back into GNUBG and try to come up with the best move before looking at the bot's solution. Create another list for cube decisions. When you are consistently finding the best move, delete that position from the list.
This is not a shortcut to learning but, I think, helps to concentrate effort where it is most needed.
This basic idea can be taken much further with spreadsheet programing to say, read saved analysis text files (they don't take up much space) The filenames can be in another spreadsheet column. Per position the best moves can be listed on a spreadsheet userform with command buttons in random order of equity loss. Then pick the best move with a click. Your errors per position could be stored somewhere in the background and you can create you own performance stats from there.
What would be really good would be to fire up GNUBG gui from a batch file and load the position ID from the same batch file. Batch files can be created and executed by code from a spreadsheet click on, say, the spreadsheet cell containing the position ID. If anyone can see a way to write a batch file to fire GNUBG gui and load a given position ID then please let me know.

Last edited by BlueDice; 05-20-2016 at 06:21 PM. Reason: spelling
Spreadsheet as BG Learning Aid Quote
05-23-2016 , 09:01 AM
Can you share your lists of position and decision types?

I think this could work as a website. Where you enter position IDs and these are collated and searchable for a large group of people.

This site did something similar for positions in the game of go:
http://goproblems.com/
Spreadsheet as BG Learning Aid Quote
05-23-2016 , 09:29 AM
Thanks for your interest.
For my purposes position and decision categories are relevant to my own recorded major errors. Save as you go basis. Early days for me. If you need a comprehensive list of position and decision types then you could lookup Taper_Mikes posts of 2014 or you could look at the 'training' positions on http://www.backgammonstudio.com/index.php
Hope this helps
--
BD
Spreadsheet as BG Learning Aid Quote

      
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