🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Vegdahl:
>> Talking of game-playing programs, Hans Berliner at CMU had a backgammon
>> program in the late '70s - early '80s that beat the then world champion
>> pretty convincingly.  But I guess that doesn't really belong here ...
> 
> I was in the CS department at CMU when that match occurred.  The victory
> in the deciding game was anything but convincing.  The score might have
> appeared convincing due to doubling ... I do remember Hans relating
> the story to some of us in the department; he gave the strong impression
> that his program was very lucky to have won the match.

Berliner had a paper on this program in "Artificial Intelligence" in '80 or
'81.  I seem to remember reading that afterwards, they reversed positions
to test the program: the "opponent's moves" fed to the program were in fact
its own moves when it had played the world champion, and in almost all
cases, it made exactly the move the world champ himself had made in that
position.  I was tremendously impressed by this.

Again, I'm not sure how much a discussion on machine checkers belongs in
net.chess -- I've changed the followup line to cross-post this article to
net.ai: please send followups to this article to net.ai ONLY.
-- 
Saumya Debray
SUNY at Stony Brook

	uucp: {allegra, hocsd, philabs, ogcvax} !sbcs!debray
	arpa: debray%suny-sb.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
	CSNet: debray@sbcs.csnet