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Constructing Pin Endgame Databases for the Backgammon Variant Plakoto

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Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9525))

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Abstract

Palamedes is an ongoing project for building expert playing bots that can play backgammon variants. Until recently the position evaluation relied only on self-trained neural networks. This paper describes the first attempt to augment Palamedes by constructing databases for certain endgame positions for the backgammon variant of Plakoto. The result is 5 databases containing 12,480,720 records in total; they can calculate accurately the best move for roughly 3.4 × 1015 positions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an endgame database is created for this game.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    No-contact positions where a player has pinned the 1-point (also known as “mana” point) are proven double wins for the pinning player except for the rare cases when the opponent has also pinned the 1-point (tie).

  2. 2.

    For brevity, ‘he’ and ‘his’ whenever ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ are meant.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions that contributed to improving the final version of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Nikolaos Papahristou & Ioannis Refanidis

Authors
  1. Nikolaos Papahristou
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  2. Ioannis Refanidis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikolaos Papahristou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden University , Leiden, The Netherlands

    Aske Plaat

  2. Leiden University , Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jaap van den Herik

  3. Leiden University , Leiden, The Netherlands

    Walter Kosters

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Papahristou, N., Refanidis, I. (2015). Constructing Pin Endgame Databases for the Backgammon Variant Plakoto. In: Plaat, A., van den Herik, J., Kosters, W. (eds) Advances in Computer Games. ACG 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9525. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27992-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27992-3_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27991-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27992-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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