Murat's first mutant cube script experiment and preliminary results

[MK]

Firstly, let me be forthright that my purpose with these
experiments is to debunk the so-called "cube skill theory"
or at least raise serious doubts about it. So, I'd fully
understand you guys' unwillingness to contribute to it by
helping me with my scripts, etc.

With that said, since the crude script I had posted here,
I decided that instead of duplicating Axel's experiment,
(which I was the one who had suggested), I would start
with an even more radical "mutant cube experiment" where
the mutant doubles and takes randomly but never resigns.

I can't imagine any worse cube strategy than doubling or
taking even when one's winning chances are near zero.

To make up for that "no cube skill at all" the mutant
never drops, this in effect, turning the cubeful game
into a cubeless game as much as possible by forcing it
to be played out until the end or until the bot drops.

I have two other experiments planned and may come up with
more later on. I will share my scripts so that, instead
of taking my word for things, you can use them to run your
own experiments to see the results for yourselves.

I have documented what they do using lots of comments. It
asks for a starting game number for a session and for the
number of games to run. On my, probably below average CPU,
it takes about 15 minutes for 100 games. That works out to
about 10,000 games in 24 hours. I suggest you run it in
sessions of 100-500 games and from the Python interactive
interpreter, so that, if it fails you still will have a
chance to view and save things.

It saves each game with a long filename containing lots
of stats and finally saves the match with a similar name.
All this is documented in the script. If you want neatly
consecutive game numbers, use the last game number as the
start of session, i.e. after session=0, games=100, going
from 1 to 100, you can enter session=101 and games = 100
to go from 101 to 200, etc...

You can download the script from:

https://montanaonline.net/backgammon/py/MuratMutantCubeRandom.py

The directory listing of filenames for my first run of 100
are saved in a text file that you can download from:

https://montanaonline.net/backgammon/py/MuratMutantCubeRandom.txt

I also imported the text file into a spreadsheet, (with sorted
O's and X's wins, including totals), that you can download from:

https://montanaonline.net/backgammon/py/MuratMutantCubeRandom.ods

One outstanding feature of my script is that it can go beyond
the maximum 4,096 cube value limit of GnuBG by recycling the
cube value without altering the cube ownership, as many times
as it may be needed.

In my first session of 100 games, I was lucky enough to see the
cube go as high as 2^34 = 17,179,869,184

I ran another 100 and two 500 game sessions with the following
points won Gnubg World-Class checker and cube, Mutant World-Class
checker and random cube as described above):

Gnubg = 543,696,648
Mutant= 17,180,933,757

Gnubg = 6,995,268
Mutant= 9,344

Gnubg = 4,441,646,726
Mutant= 1,076,936,738

Gnubg = 6,764,733,622
Mutant= 2,152,163,991

Granted this much is hardly significant sampling but I think it
gives a hint of what you may expect in the long run. Don't take
my word for anything; run your own sessions as long as you want.
I predict that the results will be quite unsettling to most of
you. Please share any results that you may get.

MK