| |
BGonline.org Forums
I have no idea why this question fascinates me but it does!
Posted By: Michael Petch In Response To: Origin of the term "bot" (Timothy Chow)
Date: Wednesday, 29 September 2010, at 9:32 a.m.
Occasionally, I'll read something esoteric enough that my mind decides it is interesting to devote some brain cells to. This is one of those cases. After giving it some thought, I may never be able to answer the who and exactly when but I offer up an opinion as to what may have occurred.
First though, I'd like to state that I'd bet good money that had Chess and Backgammon artificial intelligence grew up together that we would find ourselves using "Backgammon Engine", and "Backgammon AI" much like they use "Chess Engine" and "Chess AI" today. Chess AI's have been in development for a lot longer than backgammon ones. I would state the case that Chess is far more further along in this regard compared to backgammon.
With that being said, why would the time that backgammon AI's have any bearing on the matter? Well because of one thing - FIBS. It's rather interesting that Backgammon AI's were coming to some prominence at the same time FIBS was developed and became operational. I believe that FIBS was a catalyst for the prolific term "Bot" being used today.
Back when FIBS came online many developers interfaced their AI's to the FIBS software and created accounts that players could play against. I think this allowed the developers to see how well particular variants of software performed against reasonably good competition. I'll also go on to say that in the early days many expert players were involved with FIBS, and had knowledge of it as a place to play serious online backgammon.
From the perspective of the developers they were creating "Bots" to play backgammon through the FIBS interface. Effectively they were mimicking what a human player did to play via FIBS. The same way people created "IRC Bots" to automate tasks to interact with users, and the "Rep Bot" that maintained FIBS reputations. Some of those early bots were implementations of JF, and TD gammon among others (And eventually Snowie, and Gnubg), but some had "bot" in their names.
I am venturing to guess that as Expert Players began using FIBS, and knew of the Bots playing backgammon they eventually associated "Bot" in general with backgammon playing software. And to this day that tradition continues.
If not for FIBS early on, I think we'd be here using the more common Chess terminology.
Just an opinion.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.