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A few comments

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Thursday, 14 December 2017, at 2:36 a.m.

In Response To: A few comments (Florin Popa)

Exploiting weak players is certainly an interesting avenue but I'm not sure that AlphaZero is equipped to conquer that realm yet because the whole issue of adequately modeling weak players is a very difficult one that is not addressed by the recent advance.

Rolling a prime by itself is not a big challenge but when I say "snake," it's shorthand for much more than that—how do you contain two stragglers when you have 9 checkers back and 6 checkers scattered around the rest of the board; at what point should a backgamer adopt kamikaze play and flood the inner board with blots; what's the proper cube action in such positions. We already know that XG2 isn't up to snuff when it comes to playing certain positions from Bob Wachtel's book, and who's to say whether XG3 can be trusted when we make the positions even wilder? A practical backgammon player may complain that such positions are rare, but from a researcher's point of view, these are the interesting cases because they're not well understood and have the potential for major improvement.

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