Cheating or luck?

[Remkar]

Apparently I’ve insulted the cult that is BGA BG players.

I think you are reading far too much into our tone (and maybe not enough into how you came off).

Do you think you are the first person to consider this stuff? Do you think nobody has tested all of this already? Do you think you are more knowledgeable on the subject than the multitudes of people that have already looked into this with expertise in mathematics, statistics, computer science, and psychology?

And based on this most recent post of yours, it's clear you don't know the fundamentals of how BGA operates (and I'm not saying this in a derogatory way, I didn't know all of this when I first started playing here until I sought it out when I was considering trying to learn to code games on here).
1) BGA did not create (or purchase) it's RNG algorithm. Instead, it uses PHP's "random_int" function which was designed to be cryptographically secure (i.e., not predictable in any way so that it can be used for security hashes and whatnot). Seeing as around 80% of websites utilize PHP in some form, an RNG problem on BGA would likely mean a fundamental problem with RNG across a large swath of the Internet.
2) BGA doesn't code it's own games. The majority of games on BGA are coded by volunteers (sometimes individual game developers pay programmers for some of the bigger name games). BGA just provides the website and coding architecture.

So, unless there is some big conspiracy, it would be highly unlikely that anything fishy was going on.

BUT, numerous people over the years have also run statistics on both BGA games themselves AND on the RNG function, and everything has always looked fine.

So, I think we're always just a bit skeptical when someone questions RNG based on their feelings about a small subset of games since we've seen plenty of independent data (some of which we've done ourselves) that says everything looks as expected.

And most of the time when people come in here making some claim about "x doubles per game over y games" or whatever, someone eventually goes and checks their game history, and what they said wasn't even true (they were either heavily exaggerating or misremembering).

So, you aren't likely to get very far with most of us unless you have some pretty solid data to back things up.

If you're interested in learning more about how your thinking might be a little off, some of these guys are pretty great teachers if you engage in a discussion and not a battle. You'll find we're pretty friendly, I think.

And even though it seems like you feel things have taken a negative turn here, I'm happy to see another math nerd on the forums, and I hope that if you come back into this thread, you can maybe start fresh and see things from our point of view based on some of the things we've posted. I certainly understand your point of view, and would have similarly at some point in my past.

I was going to talk about what I was referring to with the ad hoc vs a priori statistical thinking here, but I've run myself out of time again, but if you're interested, happy to talk about that later today or tomorrow as time permits.

[Jellby]

I never said bga cheats but on a site where participation is critical, having an algorithm that gives favorable rolls to a lesser player and makes outcomes more 50/50 is not out of line.

I find it hard to believe that BGA would have any interest in tweaking the victory rates in a game that's not even premium. And even if they did, I don't think making the winning rates 50/50 regardless of the players' experience and ability would be of any benefit, there would be no incentive for players to learn, improve their game, and keep playing.

There may of course be bugs and exploitable vulnerabilities that cheaters could take advantage of. It has happened before (not in backgammon, as far as I know). But they have to be proved with something more than gut feeling, because what has been proved countless times is that gut feelings cannot be trusted.

[bvibum]

I have also nearly quit backgammon on bga. The number of totally improbable and/or close to impossible rolls to decide games is staggering. TBH I only play now to be entertained at how awful the dice rolling algorithm is. I love bga and respect the job they’ve done on nearly all games so please, FIX THIS ON BACKGAMMON. I’ve played the game for 40+ years and dearly wish I could play here. FYI, just lost a game because I rolled 2-1 FOUR times out of five rolls at the end. The other roll? 4-1. The odds of rolling the same roll 4/5 times? A staggering amount. And it happens much too often. BGA, backgammon should be a fun game, not a novelty to laugh at.

[Jellby]

The odds of rolling the same roll 4/5 times? A staggering amount. And it happens much too often.

Really? Do you have any statistics on how often you (or anyone else) get the same roll 4/5 times?

[Remkar]

I have also nearly quit backgammon on bga. The number of totally improbable and/or close to impossible rolls to decide games is staggering. TBH I only play now to be entertained at how awful the dice rolling algorithm is. I love bga and respect the job they’ve done on nearly all games so please, FIX THIS ON BACKGAMMON. I’ve played the game for 40+ years and dearly wish I could play here. FYI, just lost a game because I rolled 2-1 FOUR times out of five rolls at the end. The other roll? 4-1. The odds of rolling the same roll 4/5 times? A staggering amount. And it happens much too often. BGA, backgammon should be a fun game, not a novelty to laugh at.

Tell me you didn't read this whole conversation without telling me you didn't read this whole conversation.

[Romain672]

Btw, as an hot take, read again my first post in the first page (the 5th post). People are seeing condradictory things, and are enough confident on it to share their feeling on the forum.

[The_Trioker]

The odds of rolling four times 1-2 in five consecutive rolls are approximately of 0.000045
(Not exactly the question you asked, but still relevant I guess)

What is the reference number of your game ?

[BoatsandJoes]

The odds of rolling four times 1-2 in five consecutive rolls are approximately of 0.000045

If we don't count the first roll (it could be anything: we just care if 3 (or more) out of the next 4 are the same), it's instead 0.07% (assuming fair dice). Still unlikely to happen in any specific 5 rolls, but there are idk, 25ish rolls per game, and bvibum has played 371 games of backgammon according to their game history, so it's not that unlikely for it to happen once.

I'm not sure what the other unlikely events were, but it might be interesting to look at some BGA backgammon data and do some statistical analysis to confirm that the dice are fair. But there is a new version of Backgammon coming sometime soon anyway.

[CaractacusPots]

Well well

3 years on and I see plenty of people are still complaining about the randomness of the game.

I don't personally believe there exists a true random game of backgammon anywhere on the internet so it's not something to lay at BGA's door imo.

Programming a strong backgammon AI is extremely hard I would expect and it would be far easier to just tweak the dice throws to swing games one way or the other.

If there did exist true RNG usage in an internet backgammon game then all the decent players would consistently pawn the lesser players and the latter would simply get bored and go to some other website where they seem to win. So keeping everything as balanced as possible is to my mind a way to keep the majority of people coming back time and time again. You'll lose a minority of very good backgammon players who believe that the game is hooky from extensive experience of playing real games but that would be acceptable collateral loss if it keeps the majority of lesser players coming back.

One of the top BG pieces of software was always JellyFish but even that is very highly suspect imo if you allow it to generate the dice throws. It's just how it is, I just accept it. When I use such BG software I always disable the auto dice throws and switch to manual dice throws where I actually throw real dice myself and feed the numbers into the software. I win loads more matches when auto-dice throws are disabled.

There are imo countless ways to state that things are random when of course they are not. For example, a site, any site can say categorically that they use an official third party random number generator. And that can be absolutely true. However it's what they do with those randomly generated numbers that counts. For example, you can write a BG program such that at the start of the game it generates 200 randomly generated dice throws in advance of the first move. So in truth, all the dice throws ARE randomly generated by that 3rd party tool. But then the BG program decides WHICH of those dice throws to use and pull upon as it needs. So among the 200 throws there might be a whole bunch of doubles and the BG program can use them whenever it deems it needs to. Equally if it knocks you onto the bar it can pull out the dice throws from the 200 that keep you on the bar. Of course the more the game goes on the less dice throws there are to pull from but most games are quite short.

So, it's plain to see that the statement "we use a 3rd party random number generator" whilst being true actually stands for nothing because it's how those random numbers are used and called up by the actual software that matters.

In the end any serious backgammon player who plays ANY internet backgammon tends to know very quickly a clear difference between real life games and internet games.

Each to their own of course. If whiling away an hour on such games is your thing then knock yourself out.

For any half-decent backgammon player though, I believe it's going to be an exercise in severe frustration.

All imho.

[Jellby]

3 years on and I see plenty of people are still realising that there's nothing random about the backgammon here.

Of course, people are people, they (a) do not read previous discussions and (b) make the same mistakes over and over.

In fact there doesn't exist a true random game of backgammon anywhere on the internet so it's not something to lay at BGA's door.

Indeed. Not even if you play physically with dice. Did you know throwing dice is not a random process? The outcome is completely determined by how you throw the dice and the features of the dice and table surface. Nothing random there.

Programming a strong backgammon AI is extremely hard and it's just far easier to cheat the dice throws that do that programing.

Cheating with dice would require quite a sophisticate AI. You're right that it's hard to program a good one, and that's (one of the reasons) why it's not done. Neither AI nor cheating.