It’s truly like AI the bots had taught themselves how to play backgammon! They played themselves millions of times, following a simple racing strategy at first, but soon learned what maximized wins and began to appropriately value and seek better positions. They were only taught to track certain features on the board (like the number of consecutive blocking points) and to decide for themselves whether they were meaningful. There were no databases of moves and no expert advice given to the machines. TD-Gammon was developed in 1991 and was followed in 1992 by Jellyfish and Snowie. In the 90’s, when neural networks revolutionized the bots, machines had truly reached the level of top humans. Later analysis of the games showed that the human was actually the stronger player and only lost due to bad luck, but Pandora’s box had been opened. When world champion Luigi Villa lost a backgammon match 7-1 to a program by Hans Berliner in 1979, it was the first time that a bot had beaten a world champion in any game. These stories of seemingly unbeatable champions finally meeting their match and conceding defeat give us a glimpse into the unlimited potential for future problem-solving techniques. For each game, there’s only one time in human history when machines take us down and never look back, and for almost all games, that moment in time is in the recent past. As a game freak and a data wonk, there are few things more interesting to me than the ongoing battle between man and machine, with popular games serving as the battlefield.
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