
Ask HN: Go, chess, but can an AI win at backgammon? - mettamage
I just played my first game and got in a discussion about it. My opponent said that computers can’t do it yet. I was surprised since it’s a game of perfect information.<p>I used a couple of search engines to skim some articles but I get the feeling that some people in the HN crowd can give a better perspective on it.<p>Why can’t an AI win at backgammon? Or can they and did I skim a bit too much?
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yorwba
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-
Gammon) (1992)

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mettamage
1992, but not total domination. Couldn’t OpenAI solve this, or a similar
research group?

I am surprised it is still out in the open. Even poker seems to be more
“solved” than backgammon.

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yorwba
If it was possible to achieve a level close to top human players with
computing resources available in 1992, hardware of equivalent cost can
probably handily beat any human in 2020. So no big lab is going to spend any
time on hammering home that point, because they're looking for interesting
research problems, like games where no program plays at human level yet.

If you want to see how well computers play using consumer hardware, maybe try
[https://www.gnu.org/software/gnubg/](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnubg/) I
have no idea whether a rating of 2000 is superhuman or not.

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slowdog
Depends on your definition of win.

Do you mean perfect game?

Be the best?

Beat the average player?

I think there’s a bunch of vagueness but let’s take “win” to be generally
better than humans, I’m not an AI expert but I suspect it’s got more to do
with the popularity of the game

There’s no reason why backgammon can’t be played by machines, and definitely
no reason why they would well. There’s just not as much as a marketing pop
compared to chess, go or Starcraft all well regarded complex games. In a lot
of ways, googles investment in AI is a marketing opportunity, and in an
unpopular game there’s not as much incentive

