TD-Gammon

TD-Gammon was a computer backgammon program developed in 1992 by Gerald Tesauro at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Its name comes from the fact that it is an artificial neural net trained by a form of temporal-difference learning, specifically TD-lambda.

TD-Gammon achieved a level of play just slightly below that of the top human backgammon players of the time. It explored strategies that humans had not pursued and led to advances in the theory of correct backgammon play.

Each turn while playing a game, TD-Gammon examines all possible legal moves and all their possible responses (two-ply look-ahead), feeds each resulting board position into its evaluation function, and chooses the move that leads to the board position that got the highest score. In this respect, TD-Gammon is no different than almost any other computer board-game program. TD-Gammon's innovation was in how it learned its evaluation function.

TD-Gammon's learning algorithm consists of updating the weights in its neural net after each turn to reduce the difference between its evaluation of previous turns' board positions and its evaluation of the present turn's board position—hence "temporal-difference learning". The score of any board position is a set of four numbers reflecting the program's estimate of the likelihood of each possible game result: White wins normally, Black wins normally, White wins a gammon, Black wins a gammon. For the final board position of the game, the algorithm compares with the actual result of the game rather than its own evaluation of the board position.

After each turn, each weight in the neural net gets updated according to the following rule:

where:

Unlike previous neural-net backgammon programs such as Neurogammon (also written by Tesauro), where an expert trained the program by supplying the "correct" evaluation of each position, TD-Gammon was at first programmed "knowledge-free". In early experimentation, using only a raw board encoding with no human-designed features, TD-Gammon reached a level of play comparable to Neurogammon: that of an intermediate-level human backgammon player.

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