The first strong computer opponent was BKG 9.8. It wasprogrammed by Hans Berliner in the late 1970s on a PDP-10 as anexperiment in evaluating board positions. Early versions of BKGplayed badly even against poor players, but Berliner noticedthat the critical mistakes the program made were always at phasechanges. He applied basic principles of fuzzy logic to smoothout the transition between phase changes, and by July 1979, BKG9.8 was ready to play against then current world champion LuigiVilla. It won the match, 7-1, becoming the first computerprogram to defeat a world champion in any game, although thiswas mostly a matter of luck, as the computer happened to getbetter dice rolls than its opponent in that match.
Beginning in the late 1980s, creators of backgammon-playingsoftware began to have even more success with a neural networkapproach. TD-Gammon, developed by Gerald Tesauro of IBM, was thefirst of these computer programs to play at or near the expertlevel. This program's neural network was trained using TemporalDifference learning applied to data generated from self-play.
This line of research has resulted in two modern commercialprograms, Jellyfish and Snowie, the shareware BGBlitz(implemented in Java), and the free software GNU Backgammon,that play on a par with the best human players in the world. Itis worth noting that without their associated "weights" tableswhich represent hours or even months of tedious neural nettraining, these programs play no better than a human child.
It is interesting to contrast the development of backgammonsoftware with that of chess software:
For backgammon, neural networks work better than any othermethods so far. For chess, brute force searching, withsophisticated pruning and other refinements, works better thanneural networks.
Every advance in the power of computer hardware hassignificantly improved the strength of chess programs. Incontrast, additional computing power appears to improve thestrength of backgammon software only marginally.
For both backgammon and chess, it is at present unclear whetherthe best computer or the best human is best overall. For mostother games, one or the other is unambiguously stronger.
About the Author
Joe Boggs,a seasoned Backgammon Player and active contributor toBackgammon Guidewhere online backgammon is covered more in-depth: Including Backgammonhistory, rules,news, blog and soo much more..
BILL ROBERTIE
Bill Robertie has been recognized as a true contributor to Backgammon, the game of luck and skill. He is an all time famous backgammon player and has won the most prestigious title; 'World Champion of Backgammon'. He belongs to the rare community as he has won the title at Monte Carlo twice, once in 1983 and again in 1987. Bill also won the Pro-Am at Bahamas in the year 1993. The Istanbul World Cup has further added a feather to his cap of honor in 1994. Article by Kenny Hunt ( 5/4/2006 5:54:35 AM)
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The first strong computer opponent was BKG 9.8. It wasprogrammed by Hans Berliner in the late 1970s on a PDP-10 as anexperiment in evaluating board positions.... Article by Joe Boggs ( 4/27/2006 12:06:01 PM)
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Online gambling is quite similar to gambling and betting at aregular land-based casino, with the exception that it iscompletely done online. All games that can be played at a normalcasino can also be played online, including roulette, blackjack,cards, bingo and slots.... Article by Ross Belgrave ( 4/26/2006 5:33:06 AM)
