How Good is XG Mobile? What I’ve described so far is the full-featured eXtreme Gammon running on Windows desktops or laptops. Note however that eXtreme Gammon does not claim to support such an arrangement, so if something goes wrong you’re presumably on your own. XG’s web site mentions the ‘Parallel Desktop 4.0’ package as one such emulator. There are emulator programs which create a Windows environment in a separate window on a MAC. You can go through an entire match and mark moves you want XG to roll out, then batch the entire group to run overnight.ĭoes XG Run on a MAC? XG is a Windows product, so it won’t run unaided on a MAC. You can very easily transcribe matches that exist only in video or text form. You can import recorded matches from recent tournaments directly into XG and study the games of the best players. You can choose colors, board, and checker styles from a very large palette. There are almost too many to mention, but here are a few of my favorites. On an older or severely underpowered machine, you might have to drop down to ‘Champion’ level to play comfortably.Įxtra Features. Even on slower laptops, the XGR+ level plays at an acceptable speed (a few seconds per move). When playing against XG on an i7 quad-core machine, all the levels are virtually instantaneous except for XGR++. Supposedly XG version 3 is being developed and refined to address these problems. These positions arise very rarely in normal play, so XG has never had a chance to train itself in these situations. There are certain types of positions where XG makes systematic mistakes: massive backgames and certain kinds of containment positions. XG plays extremely well, and its occasional mistakes in normal-type positions will usually be caught by a rollout analysis. At any of the higher levels, XG is considerably stronger than the best human players.ĭoes XG play perfectly? No. Which one you use depends on the speed of your processor. If you’re using XG to improve your own game, then you should use one of the higher levels (Champion through XGR++). The lower levels allow beginners to create a competitive situation for practice. When you practice against XG, you can set its playing strength to any of 11 different levels. (1296 trials is the default.) In 99% of the cases, the rollout will confirm the analysis, but once in a while the rollout will say a different play is better. If you’re suspicious of the result or just want the best possible answer, you can force XG to do a rollout of any length. In most situations, you’ll just pick the highest level (called XGR++) and let XG do its thing. You can enter a position into XG and choose the level of analysis you want. Frankly, I’d buy XG if it cost 10 times what it does.Īnalysis Levels. But one installation of XG costs only $60, and you can buy two installations for $90! It’s a little like going out to buy the latest Lexus LS and discovering that Lexus has cut the price to $10k. The full-featured version of Snowie came in at a cool $380, and backgammon pros were happy to pay that 15 years ago. The top-of-the-line version of Jellyfish sold for $250 in 1995. Now let’s look at some of the features that make XG an essential tool for a backgammon player. XG version 2 followed a few years later, and version 3 is rumored to be nearing release.Īll right, that’s enough of a history lesson. Snowie ruled the roost for 11 years but in 2009 the first version of XG was released with yet another big jump in playing strength as well as huge improvements in speed and user features. In 1998 Jellyfish was superceded by Olivier Egger’s Snowie, which featured another jump in playing strength and many additional user features. Jellyfish was similar in playing strength to TD-Gammon, but added plenty of useful features to make it a successful commercial product.
IBM had no interest in marketing TD-Gammon, but in 1994 Frederick Dahl created Jellyfish, a second-generation neural net. Neural nets turned out not to be suitable for some applications, but they were fabulously successful when applied to backgammon. The project was designed to test the effectiveness of neural-net technology in various real world applications.
Gerry Tesauro at the IBM research laboratories in White Plains back in the late 1980s. The first generation was a program called ‘TD-Gammon’, developed by Dr. Period.ĮXtreme Gammon is a fourth-generation neural net backgammon program. It’s the best backgammon software available, and if you’re a serious player (or aspire to be one) you have to have it. Do I like this product? Do I really like this product? Can I wholeheartedly recommend it, or do I have a few lingering reservations?įortunately, eXtreme Gammon (or ‘XG’ as it’s known in the backgammon world) presents no such problems.