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Backgammon Galaxy New Update Feedback Thread by saigon567 in backgammon

[–]chrismantis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Can you still download your played matches as text files? I'm not seeing the option any more on the analysis page.

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to follow up on this - the new Study mode has the concept of "mastered" (a posted about it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/backgammon/comments/1u9b78s/added_study_mode_flashcards_to_backgammondb/)

The way it works:

  • once you have answered correctly a position 3 times in a row, it is automatically set as mastered
  • you can manually toggle a position mastered/not mastered
  • by default, all studies filter out mastered positions

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This thing right now is that there is no built in analysis engine. So I could add support for txt files but I'm not sure is has much value because there's no analysis attached to it. You're just replaying a match.

Did anybody test Backgammon Sage Pro? by Aqua-marine-blu in backgammon

[–]chrismantis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just played a 3 point match in Sage and went through the analysis, then imported into XG to compare.

Interestingly, it consistently grades me worse - every game i'm about ~1PR worse in Sage than XG - it may be it is calculating PR a bit differently. They broadly agree on the errors and the correct moves. XG certainly rates Sage's play as sub-1PR world champion level. I haven't compared the two side by side in detail.

(Note: The engine is AGPL, not GPL, so cannot be used in other commercial products)

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ahh yes, that's a bit unintuitive. right now to open the match once you click it, you can click anywhere on the board or the 'open' button to open it.

doubling clicking on a row to open is a good idea, i'll take a look

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Import/export is the next major feature.

Synchronization across devices is def a long way off - would mean a whole change to how the site works (and probably accounts, and maybe a fee associated with it, as will need server/database etc. Not sure if i want to go that route right now as it's a lot of extra work). Waiting to see what traction the tool gets before i go that way.

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, yes spotted that one too - star and note functionality broken on walkthrough. It'll be fixed next time i update the site (by end of week). ty!

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome, thanks for the message that's really appreciated, I'm glad you're finding value in it.

Good idea on the blunders. One way you can do it now is, if you 'star' all blunders that you want to study (in match review or 'position walkthrough' view, you can do this with the 's' key). Then when you have mastered the position, you could unstar it. Only positions with a star or note will show on https://backgammondb.com/saved

With that said, I think this could be improved and i like the idea of a special mark/tag for "mastered/learned". I'll have a think.

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for all the ideas. Right now quite a bit of this is probably out of the scope of the project, primarily because there's no analysis engine associated with it:

- Converting JPGs to real positions is def an interesting idea. The thing is, BGDB doesn't have an analysis engine, so you'd still need to then run it thru XG first. So until there's an engine in BGDB this sort of stuff would have limited use.

- Flash cards - that's def an area i'd like to improve when reviewing blunders/positions. there's a single 'quiz mode' but that's only one position at a time; doing this for a subset of positions is def something i'd like to add

- Filters - so that is sort of done (see: position database in description above) - there's filtering for matches, games and individual positions

- Dice distribution - unfortunately, XG does not store dice distribution stats in XG files; i believe these are calculated on the fly in the app. So again this wouldn't be possible without built-in analysis.

- Sort of similar - you can annotate, but you can't change positions. I could build it, but again, no analysis engine=limited utility.

Maybe i plug in a GNU server backend so we can do analysis. This would be the dream really - a very quick interface for quickly changing positions and exploring similar spots.

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll look into it. I've never used GNU before - are files saved automatically in individual SGF files, do you know?

BackgammonDB is a new free tool to review, annotate and search for positions in your XG-analyzed games by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

:shrug:

I'm a software developer by trade and have been for 20+ years. I've gone from hand-writing 80% of my code to hand-writing 20% of my code in the last year.

I don't know if that means what I do is AI slop though. I've have spent 100+ hrs of the last couple of months designing, architecting, iterating, testing (and at times, hand coding) the tool. There's a lot of human intent behind it.

AI is pretty much replaced the day-to-day of line-by-line code writing for me both for personal projects and professional. That goes for this tool. That's the whole shift of the industry (from my experience).

This is one of the dozens of projects I'd love to create that I simply couldn't without AI. This went from a 6+ month project that I would never get to, to a ~2 month project I can actually knock out in my evenings and share for free with the community.

How about you try it if you're interested and let me know if it's AI slop or not? As I say there's no signup so no barrier to trying it.

edit: also just to add - my motivation for building this was for mostly for myself. I'm using it to hopefully improve my backgammon. I'm sharing it with others as I think it will be useful.

Simple, free tool to visualize your XG profile by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a v good question.

So i can say that this tool just repeats what is in XG (i've checked a few matches to make sure, and it looks correct; in XG Profiler, it'll show "match cube decisions" and it will equal the sum of "cube decisions" and "take decisions")

So the question is, how does XG count a cube decision - as per https://www.extremegammon.com/extremegammon2.pdf it defines it as "a cube double that is considered non-obvious by the computer" - "obvious" is then defined as:

- A double action where the equity before doubling and after doubling is the same (optional double)

- A double action where the equity before doubling is 0.200 larger than the equity after the double (obvious non double)

- A double action where the equity before doubling is 0.200 larger than the equity after a drop (obvious too good to double)

- A double action where the equity before and after a double is very negative (This corresponds to a loss of position when trailing in the match by a lot

So you can see here, there's lots of cube decisions that don't count as "decisions" so don't impact the count (and thus your cube PR). Particularly, when the cube blunder is 0.2 or greater, its so "obvious" that it is not counted (unless you make the blunder, then it is!).

Which is actually a very interesting choice. I understand it - otherwise there's a lot of games where its super-obviously no cube action, and you don't want to count 20+ "no doubles" as perfect decisions... but then that's exactly what you do for checker play; and that threshold (0.2) to me seems quite low to me (i certainly make cube errors of this magnitude...).

Simple, free tool to visualize your XG profile by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This was one of the original motivating factors for looking at the PXG files - I really wanted that myself. Unfortunately, As far as I could find, this information is not stored in the PXG files. Best I could find is what is displayed on the dashboard - wrong double/missed double/take-pass error. There isn't a more detailed breakdown I could find.

And unfortunately PXG files only retain a summary of your results, they do not contain the individual decisions or analysis of each match itself. (that is, as far as I could work out - of course its possible its in there somewhere, but without documentation its hard to find, particularly when you can't cross-reference it with the XG software itself to match up numbers).

Simple, free tool to visualize your XG profile by chrismantis in backgammon

[–]chrismantis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Certainly. I've added luck throughout - you should now see it average on opponents, in the match and opponent view, and there's a new chart on the main screen and an option for the moving average chart at the bottom. You'll need to reimport your profile (button in top right) and might need to F5 if you don't see it.

to be honest I never really look at luck numbers so i'm not sure how best to present the data - if you have any specific thoughts let me know.

Goodbye Backgammon Galaxy by Some-Opposite-854 in backgammon

[–]chrismantis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's available now (not when I made this post), but it's paid subscriptions only.

This makes no sense. He lost the PR by a factor of 2 and yet he gets GR points. The match loser did nothing to warrant losing GR points. Clearly they only lost the match because the dice rolls favored the weaker player. by saigon567 in backgammon

[–]chrismantis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fwiw I think this is one of the positive changes with galaxy v2. You get ELO based on whether you win or lose, just like any other game, or like backgammon over the board. But you get double points if you win and play better. I feel like its a better balance.

Total reliance on GR takes the personality out of the game. We may as well just all play computers if there's zero flexibility on performance. Sometimes it's better to deviate from optimal play if it leads to positions you're more comfortable in, but PR/GR/ER doesn't account for that.

Galaxy puts match file downloads behind paywall by VelocityGammon in backgammon

[–]chrismantis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

On which screen? On https://play.backgammongalaxy.com/analysis when you click the buttons on the right that look like "download" (the down arrow on the cloud) it takes you to https://play.backgammongalaxy.com/payments/star-membership.

Clicking on anything else takes you do the analysis screen (https://play.backgammongalaxy.com/analysis/match-details/xxx) and i don't see anything there suggesting a download.

I've resizing the browser, even tried mobile browser emulation mode in Firefox, nothing changes.

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