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Opening Statistics and Match Play for Backgammon Games

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Artificial Intelligence: Methods and Applications (SETN 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8445))

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Abstract

Players of complex board games like backgammon, chess and go, were always wondering what the best opening moves for their favourite game are. In the last decade, computer analysis has offered more insight to many opening variations. This is especially true for backgammon, where computer rollouts have radically changed the way human experts play the opening. In this paper we use Palamedes, the winner of the latest computer backgammon Olympiad, to make the first ever computer assisted analysis of the opening rolls for the backgammon variants Portes, Plakoto and Fevga (collectively called Tavli in Greece). We then use these results to build effective match strategies for each game variant.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, Thessaloniki, 54006, Greece

    Nikolaos Papahristou & Ioannis Refanidis

Authors
  1. Nikolaos Papahristou
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  2. Ioannis Refanidis
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, GR 45110, Ioannina, Greece

    Aristidis Likas

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, P.O. Box 1186, 45110, Ioannina, Greece

    Konstantinos Blekas

  3. Hellenic Open University, GR 26335, Peribola, Patras, Greece

    Dimitris Kalles

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Papahristou, N., Refanidis, I. (2014). Opening Statistics and Match Play for Backgammon Games. In: Likas, A., Blekas, K., Kalles, D. (eds) Artificial Intelligence: Methods and Applications. SETN 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8445. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07064-3_49

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07064-3_49

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07063-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07064-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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