backgammon programs inspired by TD-Gammon

JellyFish

JellyFish, by Fredrik Dahl <fredrikd@ifi.uio.no>, is a commercial program that runs under Windows. It is expert strength. According to Kit Woolsey, JellyFish 1.0 is better than TD-Gammon in some respects, though weaker overall. JellyFish 2.0 was released in March 1996; apparently the new version is somewhat stronger than the old one. Version 3.0 is in beta test as of 25 April 1997; Fredrik Dahl says that it is "slightly better than 2.02 overall, and significantly better in extreme positions like very deep backgames and outfield primes".

Fredrik Dahl wrote to me that JellyFish uses a home-grown temporal difference algorithm, rather than TD(lambda). He was understandably reluctant to release details about the program's backgammon features and network architecture.

JellyFish Backgammon Software
The official JellyFish home page, with descriptions and ordering information.

Backgammon FAQ - JellyFish
Web page. A small amount of independent info about JellyFish.

mloner

Harald Wittman <wittmann@fmi.uni-passau.edu> wrote this program. Mloner (and another version restricted to one-point matches, loner) has maintained one of the highest rankings on the First Internet Backgammon Server for nearly a year as of April 1996. (TD-Gammon hasn't played enough there to get an accurate rating for its latest version). Kit Woolsey told me in July 1995 that loner may be the strongest program, but he wasn't sure yet.

The author is thinking of turning mloner into a commercial product eventually, so he didn't tell me much about it. It uses a temporal difference method, with "some improvements" to the learning. There are "more and better" input features for the neural net. It looks ahead three ply (which means that the software must run pretty fast).

games between JellyFish and mloner

ml_vs_jf
This ftp directory contains records of many five-point matches between mloner and JellyFish.

Backgammon matches
Includes even more matches between mloner and JellyFish, in various formats.

Snowie

Olivier Egger wrote this program. Version 1.0 was commercially released in July 1998; the latest version as of June 1999 is 2.1. The author declined to tell me anything about it, but it appears to be another neural network program.

Oasya
Information about Snowie, from the company formed to commercialize it.