Backgammon Computer Software

Play and analysis

First there was the MKG 9.8 computer. It was written by Hans Berliner in the late 1970s on a DEC PDP-10 as an experiment in evaluating board game positions. Early versions of BKG played badly even against poor players, but Berliner noticed that its critical mistakes were always at transitional phases in the game. He applied principles of fuzzy logic to improve its play between phases, and by July 1979, BKG 9.8 was strong enough to play against the ruling world champion Luigi Villa. It won the match, 7–1, becoming the first computer program to defeat a world champion in any board game. .

Neural networks were used in the 80's as the main way of making backgammon programs. Gerald Tesauro of IBM's TD-Gammon was the first of these that played at expert level. . TD-Gammon's play was the first computer program that played at world champion's level, according to Kit Woolsey and Bill Robertie. Kit Woolsey said at the time that "There is no question in my mind that its positional judgment is far better than mine.".

Out of neural network research came out two commercial programs; Jellyfish and Snowie, a shareware; BGBlitz, and a GPL one; GNU Backgammon. These programs play the game great, but also provide analyzing tools and can be used to compare moves. The strength of these programs lies in their neural networks weights tables, which are the result of months of training. Without them, these programs play no better than a human novice. The only exeption is in the implementation of the bearoff phase. During that stage the software relaies less on neural network and more on a predefined equities for all possible bearoff positions.

Internet Backgammon

Backgammon software has been developed not only to play and analyze games, but also to facilitate play between humans over the internet. Dice rolls are provided by random or pseudorandom number generators. During 1992 the First Internet Backgammon Server was born. FIBS is the longest running non-commercial backgammon server. It also retains an huge community of international backgammon players. Yahoo Games offers a Java-based online backgammon room, and MSN Games offers a game based on ActiveX. . With the newcomer Play65.com obline backgammon program, one can play agaits milions of people worldwide.