Where is Snowie?
Oasya SA, the developers of Snowie, have asked GamesGrid to pay $20,000 annually to run Snowie robots online. Snowie is a wonderful program, but we have decided to decline their offer, and to take this opportunity to expand our robot suite.

We considered three other neural-net backgammon engines of similar strength Gnu Backgammon, Jellyfish, and Loner and contacted their developers to arrange to run them on GamesGrid.

Gnu Backgammon is part of the Gnu Project, an effort to develop free software software that anyone is free to run, study, redistribute, modify, and improve. Gnu Backgammon was begun by Gary Wong, and now includes contributions from many individuals, including Joseph Heled, Oystein Johansen, and Joern Thyssen.

GamesGrid Engineering developed the GGrobots based on Gnu Backgammon version 0.10. We developed a standalone evaluation module, integrated it into the GamesGrid client, and contributed refinements to Gnu's lookahead evaluation routines. Because Gnu Backgammon is free software, we will be able to continue to improve these robots, and we can take advantage of others' improvements. The ability to run robots that play at any level from 1300-1900 is one example. We are now running five Gnu robots, called GGbeaver, GGraccoon, GGotter, GGweasel, and GGchipmunk. We will have more of them within a few days. We are also developing methods to make many more simultaneous robots available on the Grid more information will be available soon.

Jellyfish, developed by Fredrik Dahl, is a commercially-available BG neural net application for standalone PCs. Loner, developed by Harald Wittmann, is a non-commercial robot, with an additional ply of lookahead compared with any of the other robots. It will take considerable effort by their developers to convert these robots to run on GamesGrid, they have indicated that they are interested, and we hope that Fredrik and Harald will find the resources to help us get these great robots on the Grid.

In any case, GamesGrid members can count on seeing more and different robots online, with shorter waiting times to play them.

last modified: 2002-10-04