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.
