You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Backgammonbg-2397-en-1e
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 912 ms · ask 12252 ms · total 1892721 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 1879478 ms · generation 13243 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 5, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "8 S o now we have our board, men and dice, how do we set up the board at the start of the game? The 30 men are placed on the board as shown in the diagram below, A , and the doubling cube is placed in the centre of the board midway between the two players (it is often placed to one side of the board", "headingPath": "Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.047891, "snippet": "6 L earning the rules of backgammon may be difficult at first, but it is actually simple to understand and play . So, to begin, what do you need to play backgammon? Just four things. Backgammon is played on a board consisting of 24 narrow triangles called 'points'. The triangles alternate in colour ", "headingPath": "Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "S o how do we start the game? Each player rolls one die and whoever gets the higher number wins the honour of playing first. If both players roll the same number, then they roll again until the two dice show different numbers. When rolling the dice each player rolls on his right-hand side of the boa", "headingPath": "the First Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031754, "snippet": "Players must share two dice when using a clock; otherwise, they may share two dice or use four dice. Each player may choose to use either a dice cup or a baffle box. A baffle box must be placed on the nonhome board side. To mix dice, the requesting player rolls all four dice. Their opponent selects ", "headingPath": "EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.031258, "snippet": "Matches must start, or resume following a scheduled suspension, at the designated time and take place in a designated playing area (non-smoking Preferred). Between games each player may call 5-minute breaks, limited in number to the match length divided by 6 (rounded down). Players may tend to emerg", "headingPath": "START OR RESUME TIMES AND BREAKS · EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030777, "snippet": "W e are nearly ready to start moving the men around the board but first we need a method of notation to describe the movement of the men. For many years there was no agreed notation but that problem was solved about 30 years ago, and there is now a universally agreed notation. Dice rolls are shown a", "headingPath": "notation", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 19, "score": 0.03031, "snippet": "If your opponent has made a homeboard point, then it is often correct to split the back men. For example, if your opponent opens with 42 and makes his 4-pt with 8/4, 6/4 and you roll 43 then you should play 24/20, 13/10. If your opponent has started by splitting to your 5-pt, for example, by playing", "headingPath": "A Couple More Guidelines", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.029644, "snippet": "T he greatest challenge in backgammon is in consistently finding the 'right' play . One of the reasons it took computers so long to become good at the game is that on every turn there are so many possible moves and until sophisticated techniques came into existence computers were useless at the game", "headingPath": "Choosing a Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS", "sharpsignalDocId": 149}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "the First Move", "sharpsignalDocId": 148}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 148 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 148 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 6, 2026 14:42
retrieval — what the passage search returned
what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.
per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| fused rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game | p.5 | 0.048916 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | Backgammon History · the equipment · Backgammon Board · Men (Checkers) · Dice · Doubling Cube | p.4 | 0.047891 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | the First Move | p.8 | 0.032002 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — WBGF Tournament Rules (corpus doc 149) | EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS | p.2 | 0.031754 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — WBGF Tournament Rules (corpus doc 149) | START OR RESUME TIMES AND BREAKS · EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE | p.1 | 0.031258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | notation | p.6 | 0.030777 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | A Couple More Guidelines | p.19 | 0.03031 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | Choosing a Move | p.15 | 0.029644 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.
the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | Doubling Cube · starting and objective · starting Position · the objective of the Game | p.5 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Backgammon — WBGF Tournament Rules (corpus doc 149) | EQUIPMENT: SELECTION, SETUP AND CHANGE · ERRORS IN THE STARTING POSITION · VALID ROLLS | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Backgammon — Beginner's Guide (Chris Bray, Parragon 2013) (corpus doc 148) | the First Move | p.8 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 912 ms · first delta 12102 ms · total 1892721 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 1879478 ms · retrieval 912 ms · ask 12252 ms · gateway work 13243 ms · total 1892721 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 4337
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 148
- tok/sec
- 136.9 tok/sec — 148 output tokens in 1.081 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 10s ago)
- stream path
- streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
- watchdog
- first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
- num_ctx · think posture
- both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
disposition
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
- answered — no abstain rationale applies
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
- pattern that matched
- SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 70), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.