Neurogammon wins Computer Olympiad

[Gerald Tesauro]

Neurogammon 1.0 is a backgammon program which uses multi-layer
neural networks to make move decisions and doubling cube decisions.
The networks were trained by back-propagation on large expert
data sets.  Neurogammon competed at the recently-held First
Computer Olympiad in London, and won the backgammon competition
with a perfect record of 5 wins and no losses.  This is a victory
not only for neural networks, but for the entire machine learning
community, as it is apparently the first time in the history of
computer games that a learning program has ever won a tournament.

A short paper describing Neurogammon and the Olympiad results will
appear in the next issue of Neural Computation. (This was inadver-
tently omitted from Terry Sejnowski's recent announcement of the
contents of the issue.) The paper may also be obtained on-line in
plain text format by sending e-mail to TESAURO at ibm.com.