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Whatever happened to Zare, ZBot, Chow..?

Posted By: MK
Date: Monday, 29 June 2026, at 4:13 a.m.

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

> Stick alerted me to this thread.

After I told him how much I missed you.. ;)

> The conventional wisdom is that backgammon has been "solved" by XG, but that's only if you exclude superbackgames.

The problem is more than just super backgames. The fallacy is with asking "how long is a yard stick?" and answering "one yard long".

Comparing Jellyfish, Snowie, XG, GnuBG, etc. to one another is just comparing yard sticks from different manufacturers with minor differences. They are all incest bastards of TD-Gammon with genetic birth defects.

Comparing bots to humans is not only impractical but also pointless since they all, (except me;), try to imitate the bots. Take our "giant" "stick", for example. He looks a few inches shy of a yard standing next to XG. (Sorry, stick, I just couldn't help it:)

> my colleague Ben Howard,

Ah, finally we know his name... ;)

> 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.

Wouldn't this be something really interesting to discuss, instead of daily stupid discussions about how XG would have played this position, would have cubed that position?

Why don't you invite your "colleague" here to start up a thread about it? I'm sure there are plenty of geniuses and giants here who would be interested.

> It's also not clear how much computational power he'll be able to afford to throw into the training.

The new billionaire owner of XG surely will be able to afford it but you may want to tell him to not waste his money and time in "re-founding" XG since backgammon had already been "solved" by the long abandoned, obsolete XG that he paid money for.

If all you can do is to measure it against itself, a yard stick will always be about one yard long...

MK

PS: I wonder if the flock of the gamblegammon church really wants a "re-founded" XG or some other alpha-zero BG bot that will be considerably superior. Wouldn't that make them feel stupid for having worshipped primitive gods for decades..?

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