Re: current development

[Philippe Michel]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2019 at 02:07:18PM -0500, Timothy Y. Chow wrote:

> Also, it's my impression that many people *don't* think this is even a 
> worthwhile idea to pursue.  Backgammon is already "solved," is what they 
> will say.  It's true that "AlphaGammon" will surely not crush existing 
> bots in a series of (say) 11-point matches.  At most I would expect a 
> slight advantage.  But to me, that is the wrong way to look at the issue. 
> I would like to understand superbackgames for their own sake, even though 
> they arise rarely in practice.  Furthermore, if we know that bots don't 
> understand superbackgames, then the closer a position gets to being a 
> superbackgame, the less we can trust the bot verdict.

I'm not sure how related it may be, but there is a group of Greek 
academics that have published some articles on their work on a bot, 
Palamedes, that plays backgammon but also variants that have different 
rules and starting positions and lead to positions that would be very 
uncommon in backgammon.