[Bug-gnubg] miscellaneous bugs and suggestions

[Robert-Jan Veldhuizen]

Hi team,

a whole list this time :-)


bugs:

- "alert! missed double (x.xxx)" gets inserted when copying data from hint 
window

- rollout windows on my PC are often a bit too small (last two digits of 
"cubeful" not shown) so I have to resize them.

- bug or feature: in money games using Jacoby with cube in center, gammons 
don't count for cubeLESS equity, both with cubeless rollouts/evaluations, 
and in the upper row when rolling out a cube decision (or doing a cubeful 
rollout with cube centered). I think cubeless evaluations and rollouts 
should ignore the Jacoby rule (after all it's cubeless) and just count 
gammons (and play according to that!). For the rollout cube decision, even 
if the cube is still centered now, it'll probably be turned in the future 
so this seems more like a bug really. In fact it seems that winning gammons 
on a center-cube with Jacoby is extremely unlikely with "normal" play, so 
maybe just all gammons should count in a cubeful rollout, even when the 
cube is still centered (although play should be according to the Jacoby 
rule here!).



questions:

- if I use 3-ply lookahead and no 1-ply pruning, will the search space I 
set be used for 2-ply, and half of that for 3-ply? That is what I'd expect, 
but I've been wondering if that's what's really happening. Could it be that 
the 3-ply search space is a quarter of what I set, as would happen WITH 
1-ply pruning?

- for cube decisions, is the search space relevant? If so, how is it being 
used?

- just wondering, is it clear to any (native) English speakers that a 
"novice" is a better player than a "beginner", as by GNUBG's ratings?



suggestions:

- it would be nice if there was a quick way to see the MET in use. Perhaps 
the "options" window could show that near the "load" button?

- I think the MET in use should be included in rollout results; at least as 
an option. It can have a significant impact on results sometimes. And 
perhaps the random generator and seed could be left out of the report as an 
option then.

- perhaps some "direct access" 0,1,2 and 3-ply evaluation buttons in the 
hint and annotation window, so one doesn't have to change the search space 
for this (and change it back to its original setting even).

- with today's CPU-speeds, maybe reduced (33%) 3-ply evaluation would be 
useful (for analyzing mainly), or even 33% 4-ply?

- maybe the "noise" settings could disappear from the GUI? Some users seem 
to be confused about this and the few(?) people using it might have little 
problems using the text command?

- after analyzing a match, when I want to do a better evaluation or a 
rollout on a cube decision, the result is only shown (and counted in 
statistics) for the player on roll (either the doubler or the taker). Since 
all values are computed anyway, why not change the figures for both 
players? Now I have to do an identical evaluation/rollout, taking twice as 
much time. See next suggestion though:

- how about extending "rollout cube decision" so that one can also just 
check the double decision (only upper rollout) OR take decision (only lower 
rollout), instead of both? Sometimes it's just one side of the decision 
that's really interesting, and this would be faster. Combining this with 
the above suggestion, the user could choose to either rollout both 
decisions at once and figures being updated for both players then, or just 
for one player if he rollouts out for only one part of the decision.

- the tolerance for "world class ++"/"enormous" is set at 1.0, that seems 
unnecessarily large to me: at 2-ply it is very unlikely that a play is 
best, that is more than 1.0 worse than the best play at 0-ply, or 0.5 worse 
at 1-ply. As a result, many plays that are downright awful will be 
evaluated at 2-ply. Now the standard "world class" setting uses tolerance 
0.16, which is ok but can be too small for some purposes.  Maybe something 
inbetween would be most useful, like tolerance 0.4-0.5. That'll leave out a 
lot of bad plays and thus save time, while still finding the best move 
probably >99.9% of the time.

- perhaps besides the full speed ahead "gigantic" setting, which is more or 
less a non-restricted search space, maybe something inbetween would be 
useful too. Like 32 candidate moves, tolerance ...well, 0.6-0.7 perhaps. 
Some positions with many legal plays can have lots of close plays too, and 
16 is sometimes just not enough.


Thanks all for your continous efforts on GNUBG!

--
Robert-Jan Veldhuizen