What's new in BGBlitz 2.8.4
Jan 11, 2016
- Some new features. Most important:
- The cube liveness heuristic was optimized.
- The AI got some speed improvements.
- For the techies: BGBlitz now supports AVX and FMA3 CPU-Instructions, but from now on native code is only supported for 64-Bit CPUs.
- It has always been difficult to develop an AI that plays weaker, so less experienced players are not frustrated. Adding random to the evaluation leads to sometimes ridiculous moves followed by excellent ones, but it doesn't feel like playing against a human. From now on for the lower settings a weaker AI is used. It doesn't understand more advanced concepts so less random noise has to be added. I hope this feels more like playing a human and feedback is highly appreciated.
- For the skeptics about the randomness of the dice rolls I created 8 files with one million pre calculated rolls each. They are calculated with a device that produces true random ( Infinite Noise TRNG). The files are plain text files so anyone can easily analyze them or check the sequence of rolls. I have done some statistical tests (mostly some simple Chi-square-tests) but feel free to do a more advanced analysis like DieHard or NIST.
- Several usability improvements. Most notably:
- At the first start a wizard adapts the initial settings to the user preferences and playing strength
- Setting the playing strength of the AI is easier now.
- Further three serious and a couple of minor issues was fixed (Most notable: the access to random.org works again) and some internal improvements to increase long term maintainability.
New in BGBlitz 2.8.2 (Apr 11, 2015)
- Some new features. Most important:
- you can save a picture of the current board to a file. Width and type are freely configurable. Comes handy for your blog etc...
- bulk import of positions from a directory into the position database
- better support for sgf-files, especially files containing only a single position
- More than a dozen usability improvements. Most notably:
- the support of multi monitor environments and resolution changes (e.g. change of orientation on a tablet).
- the toolbar could be on the left and right side, saving precious vertical space on 16:9 screens
- Further two serious and a couple of minor issues fixed and some internal improvements to increase long term maintainability.
New in BGBlitz 2.8.0 (Dec 9, 2014)
- The tutor of BGBlitz has a new ability rating your moves in real-time. This doesn't sound too spectacular, but
- the feedback is immediate after your checker move
- it doesn't interrupt your flow
- you have an idea of the error size
- you get not only critics but positive feedback too which is important under motivational aspect.
- Added some more well looking look&feels so you have more choices to make your favorite theme look even better (Windows and Linux only).
- Naturally some effort was put in the AI. I experimented a lot, trained more than a dozen neural nets (each trained about two month), fixed a weakness in the cube heuristics and here is the new AI, not surprisingly called TachiAI IV. In the Depreli 2010 Benchmark it achieves 43.4 (down from 66. Lower is better) with 3-ply and 37.5 with 4-ply which is a decent improvement. At the same time the speed, especially for 3 and 4-ply was improved (about twice as fast) and BGBlitz now supports Match Equity tables in the XG-format.
- I play a lot on http://www.dailygammon.com. It's like correspondence Backgammon on steroids. How often you want to know "was you're move right?" or "Should I have dropped the cube?", but you are too lazy to setup the position. And waiting until the game is finished takes too long (sometimes weeks). BGBlitz comes to the rescue. Just drop the URL on BGBlitz board and you know whether you were right. Here is a screencast showing this feauture. Naturally you have to use it ethically and only look after you have moved or made your cube decision.
- Added another random number generator. It is recorded real random from "quantum randomness of photon arrival times" (see https://qrng.physik.hu-berlin.de). I included 1 million random dice, what should suffice for some time.....
- Support for Longgammon is added (a Backgammon variation with a different starting position)
- Numerous further improvements and some bug fixes among them 2 fatal errors and a dozen serious errors
New in BGBlitz 2.7.3 (May 25, 2011)
- Fixed: when the tutor was turned off, BGBlitz did freeze.
New in BGBlitz 2.7.2 (May 23, 2011)
- Bug fixes:
- when TachiAI III was used, the level of play was always Expert, independent of the selected playing strength. What a pain for casual players this must have been. Sorry!
- under heavy load the wrong dice could be displayed. Fortunately this was rare.
- a memory leak was plugged
- some erroneous Tutor hints were removed
- a deadlock could happen pressing ^G if ^F was already pressed
- Some small improvements
- at the first roll, one dice is shown on the left and one on the right side of the board
- BGBmips support for 3, 6 and 12 CPUs
- improved visibility of numbers on white checkers
- better detection of usable screen area on Linux
- drag & drop support for position database files
New in BGBlitz 2.7.0 (Oct 7, 2010)
- the checker movement looks more smoothly now
- support for the new Look and Feel "Nimbus" on Windows and Linux
- new themes elSpaans 1001 Tawlas (elSpaan) and Feltastic (Sam Rich)
- The dice rolls are animated
- visual feedback for used dice (not available for all themes)
- the doubling dialog shows an image of the current cube value
- small screen sizes are handled better better, especially on Linux and netbooks
- When you use manual dice, you can now enter the dice with the keyboard
- there is a shortcut for doubling (^d)
- the font size is adjustable in case your visual ability is reduced
- the status bar shows the EPC (equivalent pip count) instead of the Thorpe Count
- if you want to train calculating pips, there is a new toolbar button, that can be used to switch on/off the display of the pip count and shows the value of the pip count in the tooltip
- in the best moves dialog you can select to shown up to 50 moves and this dialog and the evaluation dialog always shows cubeful equities
- in the edit position dialogs you can also enter the combined position/matchID and the XGID. Further you can copy and paste either the combined position/matchID and the XGID or drag and drop those IDs on the board to get an evaluation (if no game is running). In all exports (ASCII, HTML) the XGID is given too.
- the only small thing in the AI that has been changed in this version is a better cube liveness heuristic in end game situations
- for casual players the level of game play for lower strength settings was reduced and made sure they can't accidentally use a higher search depth. Would be great if I have some guinea pigs to check whether those settings are o.k. for beginners.
- do you know the feeling: "Why I get always the worst roll?" There is a new dialog, that shows you how good each roll of dice would have been ("Game/Distribution of rolls")
- now you can install BGBlitz on an USB-stick (Just copy it on the stick and add a folder .bgblitz in the bgblitz directory)
- there is a new command line interface. It allows evaluation of positions and might be extended in the future if you have some ideas how to use it. You can use the programming language Groovy to write your programs
- Support for Snake is included (a Backgammon variation with a different starting position)
- you can read/import/convert "sgf"-files
- a Czech translation
- I invested a lot of work to make BGBlitz faster. Tuning with modern Java implementations and the newest CPUs with Turboboost is a nightmare because it is very hard to measure what is an improvement and what is noise. Nevertheless I succeeded making BGBlitz faster. The improvement depends heavily on the operating system (32 or 64-Bit), the Java-version and your CPU. The speedup is between 15% to 70% (64-Bit, Core i7 or Atom). This new stuff does some things that might not work on all computers, and even crash BGBlitz in rare cases therefore you could disable this speedup with "Setup/Miscellaneous Setting/No Unsecure Speedup". If problems occur, please drop me an email. If the new code is disabled, BGBlitz runs rock-solid as usual, only a little bit slower.
- some improvements for the network play, so it works better with multi homed computers and routers
- Close to 50 further improvements and fixes....
New in BGBlitz 2.6.2 (Oct 27, 2008)
- Drag&Drop support was broken in 2.6.0
- An error in the match database introduced in 2.6.0 is fixed. Additionally BGBlitz recognizes the broken databases and repairs them at the start.
- Some bugs in the presentation of the rollout results were fixed, especially ASCII and HTML export.
- I reduced the playing strength of the weaker levels. There was feedback that they are still far to strong for casual players. One user told me that an analyse he made says that even "Beginner" is still at world class level. Surely not what I intended.
- Some smaller bugfixes.
New in BGBlitz 2.6.0 (Sep 22, 2008)
- Some small errors are fixed. Especially an annoying one in the ".gam"-parser. Changing the Look & Feel works again without restart and a bug in the Position-ID was fixed. Some other small issues are corrected too.
- At several points the match parsers are more tolerant now, and a couple of usability improvements has been implemented. There is a new control that Mac OS X users probably recognize immediately. When you press the button Bitmap of Action Button a pop-up menu with the possible action pops up.
- The match database feature has been reworked completely. Now there is a real database with transaction handling included (www.h2database.com), giving safety for large databases. No more possible damage by an power outage. The user interface is much easier to use and more attractive. I decided that it is more convenient to have only one database, which is always there, than to handle several of them. Especially for future enhancements like user statistics etc. Don't be afraid, your old databases can be imported, either by a menu entry or by drag and drop.
- Improved the rollouts a lot. Rollouts where the the dice are rolled already, are now comfortable to perform, you can start rolloust from the "evaluate", the "best moves", the "replay" and "position display" dialog boxes. You can enter default settings for your rollouts and you can enter batch rollouts given only the match and position ids. Just for cubeful rollouts the threshold value remains. It was on the list for this release, but I realized that there are quite some places where I would like to make changes and this would delay the release for 4-6 weeks. And I can't stand further delay because of the remaining feature:
- It took month and several approaches until I was successful in creating a stronger AI. With 1-ply it wins against the old net about 1.1 points in 100 cubeless games. That's pretty nice! That value was calculated by an 8 million games benchmark against the old version, so the amount of additional strength is reliable. I'm curios to get feedback on this AI. Please make sure you select it (TachiAI III) because BGBlitz keeps your old settings.
New in BGBlitz 2.5.2 (Apr 21, 2008)
- One serious error is fixed that broke the rollouts. You might install freshly or install this patch bgblitz.jar (1.6 MB). The patch is only suited for version 2.5.0 or 2.5.1. Just replace the file in the "system" directory/folder in the BGBlitz installation. If BGBlitz shows Version 2.5.2 the update was successful.
- A bug fixed when editing a position in the position database
New in BGBlitz 2.5.1 (Mar 17, 2008)
- One serious error and a couple of smaller problems are fixed in this release. You might install freshly or install this patch bgblitz.jar (1.6 MB). The patch is only suited for version 2.5.0. Just replace the file in the "system" directory/folder in the BGBlitz installation. If BGBlitz shows Version 2.5.1 the update was successful.
- The match information contains a lot more informations and is now editable
- The parser for ".mat" files is more tolerant if there are additional comments
- If you dislike the checker shadows you can disable them on a per theme base.
New in BGBlitz 2.5.0 (Feb 18, 2008)
- # Finally, finally, finally there is a toolbar ;) I was able to use a lot of icons from the "Crystal" project (many thanks for their phantastic work) and added a few Backgammon specific ones. In the same process I redesigned the status messages so the informations are easier to grasp. Further the checkers got a shadow. Although the shadow is not calculated with exact 3D-calculations it let the board look more plastically. The movement of the checkers is now a slow in slow out that feels more natural. With several other improvements I think BGBlitz looks much more attractive now!
- When you edit a position, you can now place the checkers with the mouse wheel. The scrolling direction corresponds to the visual representation, so on the upper half you have to scroll down to add a checker and in the lower half you have to scroll up.
- Imagine you have a couple of positions you want to look at. Isn't it boring to go through the file selector dialog box all the time, even if the directory/folder is remembered? You are right. Just drag and drop the pos files on BGBlitz!
- BGBlitz supports now drag and drop for: positions to look at to evaluate or see the best moves, matches to replay, rollouts to view, interrupted matches to play on, installation of the license file.
- Several bugs were also fixed with three serious ones. Depending on the action with automatic moves an inconsistent board could occur and the random numbers for network play were flawed, you were often getting the same dice sequences in several sessions!
- A couple of minor enhancements.
New in BGBlitz 2.4.0 (Oct 4, 2007)
- * The transition to a modern user interface library that started with 2.0 is finally finished and all stuff is rewritten. From now on I can start to exploit the new possibilities. An example of the capabilities of the newer libraries are selectable Look-and-Feels (Windows and Linux only. On Mac OS X the other look-and-feels look to different).
- * The usability has improved (the boards shows the number of checkers when more than 5 checkers are on a point, the rendered boards can now be scaled as well, the editing dialog boxes are easier to use and several minor things).
- * Two new easier playing levels are included, so beginners and casual players don't get frustrated anymore.
- BGBlitz has now better support for systems with restrictive permissions.
- With the last release I already questioned how long support for 4 CPUs is enough. Just a few days later Apple published a 2x4 Mac Pro. Now BGBlitz supports up to 16 CPUs. This will be sufficient for quite some time I guess. ;)
- The matchparser is improved in several ways and doesn't rely on the file extension anymore.
- No more different versions for Mac OS X "Panther" and Mac OS X "Tiger" anymore.
- Parts are translated to Russian language by Oleg Timshin.
- Three severe bugs are fixed and half a dozen minor ones.
- A couple of smaller improvements.