Re: Mancala solved!

[Frank Berger <frankb@netcologne.de>]

At 11:16 16.09.02 -0700, Bram Cohen wrote:
>Adding more fields would bring it out of the range of complete
>brute-forceability, but that won't change the fact that on on games with
>linear boards, such as mancala and backgammon, computers soundly trounce
>humans.
>
I disagree, that the linear structure has anything todo with the
solvability. For Backgammon, the computer speed was less an issue but the
lack of an adequate algorithm. Only the seminal work of Tesauro, using
neural nets with TD(Lamba) training made strong BG programms possible. With
the algorithms used before Tesauro's TD-Gammon, even today a supercomputer
would have no good prospects against a top human.

ciao
Frank

P.S. On my website (www.bgblitz.com) you can download and example of an
neural net based Backgammon programm ;-)