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Whatever happened to Zare, ZBot, Chow..?

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Monday, 29 June 2026, at 2:09 a.m.

In Response To: Whatever happened to Zare, ZBot, Chow..? (Stick)

Stick alerted me to this thread.

The last couple of years, I have been caring for my mother, so I have had to cut down on some other activities. I remain interested in backgammon, and for example am helping Nack Ballard and David Rockwell roll out some opening plays. I might eventually return to posting regularly on BGO, but no promises at this point.

I did ask Zare about ZBot many years ago. He said that Walter Trice was doing some of the heavy lifting, and so when Trice died, the ZBot project basically died with him.

Nowadays, an obvious question is whether an AlphaZero-style algorithm might do significantly better than XG. I know that R. B. Sahi (a.k.a. Jack Mack, a.k.a. Murat) keeps hoping that "AlphaGammon" will dramatically overturn many of XG's verdicts, but I don't think that will happen. The conventional wisdom is that backgammon has been "solved" by XG, but that's only if you exclude superbackgames. It never ceases to amaze me that hardly anyone in the backgammon community is interested in seeing a bot that can actually play superbackgames (and the resulting containment positions) accurately. This is an area where I think there is potential for significant progress in backgammon bot technology.

It isn't a foregone conclusion that AlphaZero will master superbackgames with ease. It turns out that even in Go, AlphaZero has some failure modes, which are vaguely reminiscent of the backgammon bots' failure to play superbackgames correctly. Also, my colleague Ben Howard, who has done research related to AlphaZero, tells me that it's not clear how to get AlphaZero to handle the doubling cube properly, short of training it separately for each possible match score. Ben does enjoy backgammon and hopes to train an "AlphaGammon" some day, but I'm not sure when that will be. He's trained his own version of AlphaZero to play various games, but I don't know when he'll get around to backgammon. It's also not clear how much computational power he'll be able to afford to throw into the training.

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