I am curious what win rates one should expect when practicing with gnubackgammon or snowie. If we divide players into the following categories; beginner, novice, intermediate, advanced, expert, master, and world class, what should their expected result be when playing the program at its highest level. I just wonder what scoring 50% against gnu (for example) might indicate about ones actual level. For all I know it could mean you're the greatest player who ever lived. If you consider yourself a player at any of the levels listed, please share how well you find yourself doing in your practice sessions with snowie or gnu. Thanks

Playing against gnu or snowie I wouldn't worry at all about your win rate. The goal should be improving your error rate. But if you were splitting over a very large sample(playing against the highest setting) then you'd likely be the best in the world.

I think my comment was somewhat poorly phased so let get at what I am really trying to figure out. In the elo system for chess, if you play a computer that is 2800 (super gm strength) and you win 10% you are playing about 2400 level. Because that is the expectation for a 400 pt difference. That would make you better than 99% of the people who play. I just wonder if the same relationship holds for backgammon. So I just wonder how people at various levels do.
I also have some questions about the way these programs evaluate play. If you play a 30 roll game and make 2 dubious, or 1 bad, or perhaps even 1 very bad gnu will grade you as rather a bad player. But you might be making grandmaster plays about 95% of the time. If I could correctly solve 90% of the problems Bill Robertie posts I would feel that I was a pretty good player. So the relation of error rate to player evaluation is something else I find confusing.
For the record by the way, I am not anywhere near 50% more like 5 or 10 (I have not actually kept count) I just know it beats the snot out of me. But I feel like an upper intermediate level player

XG gives you an estimated elo but it isn't all that useful imo. Make a serious blunder in a game with few rolls and your elo plummets. Make that same blunder in a much longer game with a bunch of easy/obvious moves and your elo skyrockets.

I used to log all my results in Excel spreadsheet when I was just a novice player to monitor my progress. Once you played a few dozen matches you'd have a decent idea of your level and error rate.

I believe that there is a similar FIBS relationship in BG (Very good chance that I am wrong about this)

I used to have a spreadsheet deriving the formula so that I could test friends on GNU and then inform them of how frequently I would expect to beat them based on the FIBS spread

FWIW I really dont have any interest in how often programs defeat me, all that matters is the equity loss per move and how that changes over time.

Hi,

i play against gnu, and i score a rating of about 1830, he calls me a casual player, i think. I ussually play matches against gnu of 17 points and about 1 of 5 i win.

At gamecolony.com, my rating is between 1800 and 2020.
In real life in my town there are about 10 players, and my score is among the best.

I tend to take too optimistic, especially when it comes to backgames.

I hope this information helps you a bit,

greetings k.

There is virtually no correlation between chess and backgammon. Ex gammon is hands down the best player in the world, and , since the google deep mind team seem disinclined to unleash an alpha zero backgammon program upon this world, unfortunately, this will seem to remain the case into the near future. I am a world class backgammon player, and a chess master. If I were to play Magnus Carlsen in chess, I would never win a game. I would be lucky to even get one draw in 100 games. Magnus recently dropped a WHOLE PIECE against a GM in a tournament, and won anyways. This was slow chess, not speed chess-in which he had been a piece down against Hikaru Nakamura, of all people, in the online world blitz championships, and won anyways.
I win about 47.5% of DMP games against ex gammon. I don't know if this is helpful...when the cube is in play, I am even a bigger underdog. This is because I prefer matches, rather than money play, and ex gammon is much better than me at hitting doubling windows at various match scores. Ex gammon hands down creams us human beings, with a couple of exceptions. With me, that exception is the following bizarre starting position: Begin the game with fifteen checkers on the bar a piece. This position is a variant-illegal with the normal starting position. However, I am a pretty big favorite, because ex gammon misevaluates certain key positions. Try it with gnu first...it is much faster! - Hope this helps!