He basically took the bibles of backgammon and fixed them, according to what the bots hadВ discovered. He wrote a bookВ that used SnowieВ to locateВ and analyzeВ mistakes in the classic strategy guides. I think that gave it instant recognition as a force to be reckoned with.ДЄt one of the backgammon tournaments, Art introduced me to Jeremy Bagai, who did something that I think is awesome. Only later was it revealed that it was a Bot. There was a backgammon server called FIBS (First Internet Backgammon Server) that was big in the 90s and the top rated player was Jellyfish. CanвЂ™t offer an exact date and I canвЂ™t think of a specific event. I guess I would say it happened in the mid to late 90s with Jellyfish and then Snowie. I asked my friend Art Benjamin (who was the all-time point leader in the American Backgammon Tour at the time)В when it becameВ clear that bots were truly superior and he saidвЂ¦ ItвЂ™s truly like AI the bots had taught themselvesВ how to play backgammon! They playedВ themselvesВ millions of times, following a simple racing strategy at first, but soon learnedВ what maximized wins and began to appropriately value and seek betterВ 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 inВ 1992 by Jellyfish and Snowie. InВ the 90вЂ™s, when neural networks revolutionized the bots, machinesВ had truly reached the level of top humans. Later analysis of the games showedВ that the human was actually the stronger player and only lost due to bad luck, but PandoraвЂ™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 unbeatableВ champions finally meeting their match and conceding defeat give us a glimpse intoВ the unlimited potential for future problem-solving techniques.

For each game, thereвЂ™s only one time in human history when machines take us downВ andВ 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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