backgammon and computer
Pierre-Olivier LUCET
Can someone give me help about a project I have, it concerns bakgammon
and I will need help about basic strategy hints or rules which can be
implemented in a computer. Of course, the best will be a ready-to-use
algorythme but I'm not dreaming.
Thank you very much.
MLeifer
Gary Wong
> Can someone give me help about a project I have, it concerns bakgammon
> and I will need help about basic strategy hints or rules which can be
> implemented in a computer. Of course, the best will be a ready-to-use
> algorythme but I'm not dreaming.
The sources to several backgammon playing programs are available on the net:
Gerry Tesauro's pubeval (1993):
ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/connect/code/tesauro/
Alan Char's backgammon game in 4.4BSD (1993):
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/src/games/backgammon/
Lambert Klasen and Detlef Steuer's xgammon 0.96 (1994):
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/games/x11/strategy/xgammon.0.96.tar.gz
GNU Backgammon 0.02 (1999):
http://gnubg.sourceforge.net/
I believe GNU Backgammon is significantly stronger than the others (but I
would say that :-). However, pubeval and gnubg are neural nets and so their
"knowledge" (as visible to the programmer) is largely opaque; their ability
is mostly encapsulated in the net weights rather than procedural code. This
might mean that xgammon and the BSD backgammon would be more educational to
inspect.
If you are more interested in algorithm descriptions than source code, good
places to start hunting include:
The programming section in Tom Keith's _Backgammon Galore_ newsgroup archive:
http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?menu+programming
The backgammon section of Jay Scott's _Machine Learning in Games_:
http://forum.swarthmore.edu/~jay/learn-game/systems/gammon.html
Cheers,
Gary.
--
Gary Wong, Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona
ga...@cs.arizona.edu http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~gary/