When Gerry Tesauro developed the first self-educating backgammon bot, the techie TD-Gammon, a sacred dominion between mankind and the machine was flipped forever upon its Janus heads. Everyone involved in the story resists change in some way or another, including the change just to submit or to die. But the Bot persists, aloof, as a being from another galaxy, another globular cluster. The Bot: implacable, stone cold strong, fearless in offering the cube, obsessed with detail, an incessant counter of every shot to hit or make something. Intricate with tallies on average rolls to run or to accomplish a tactic. With spider senses the twisted id mastered the Beaver Redouble Bluff gambit, thereby dominating a chouette’s prospectus through the twin emotions of fear and insult.

To say mankind reacted badly is an understatement. The usual excess of the arrogant is to throw itself into a miasma of propaganda and mockery, claiming all is untrue, and not in my neighborhood. The rabble truly love this inflamed style of seeing the backgammon world as mankind-like. The rabble soon progressed to accusing the Bot of cheating !?!?! Cheating with unfair dice. Cheating by looking ahead. Cheating by listening to cosmic rays. A crucifixion of cheaters is suggested.

The Bot stays silent. But social media let slip the scalding story of the Bot sleeping with Lady Luck, regularly too, in numerous checker positions and after compromising cube situations. Whispers are certainly heard. Spin doctors crawl down from the bar and then dance the tango. Private matches spring up; mankind is given odds.

A competitor bot JellyFish springs up too. TD-Gammon was always a research project, gone mad. JellyFish is from the business end of software innovators. It did rollouts. It played fast. It blew a few mankind minds with its seemingly preternatural mastery of chance and all the darkness that entails.

When backgammon moved online for good, FIBS and GamesGrid websites led the way. Now that Bots-in-a-box could be purchased for any home computer, cheating would boomerang back onto the mankind camp. Ironically, it wasn’t the bots cheating, but some of mankind. The game websites simply cut a deal and added free play against bots for mankind members of the online backgammon clubs. The game sites played the bots quickly and urgently, adhering to some advice from Lady Luck about “Haste makes waste” for careless mankind.

Snowie came next with its flash and its stronger neural nets, beefed up bigger and trained more obsessively.

Then XG and GnuBG taught themselves how to play. Trillions of backgammon games to riffle through and distill into better synaptic strengths. And endowed with ample rollout features.

And this becomes now: the story of “the bots and the buddies”.

Get the buddies riled up and wanting to clobber the Bot. Stay tuned …

Postscript: The Beaver Redouble Bluff? Imagine you are in a chouette with most players unknown to you, or you to them. You are finally in the Box. A crew member offers an early cube, which the Captain refuses to endorse. The first time this happens with an unknown crew member, you should Beaver the early double. It is cheap advertisement of a fake recklessness. And the chouette won’t know what you as the Box might do next.