Computer opponents
Every computer opponent is named as a computer at the board and never plays as a human. Games against the computer never move a rating. How much is played against the computer is stated openly on this page — counting running and finished matches.
All four play with the same engine: a neural net (wildbg, 2-ply) in standard backgammon, an open heuristic evaluation in the regional variants. No level thinks shallower — a weaker level just deliberately plays the second- or third-best move from the same list every so often.
Play the computer
New match
A different match up to 1 point up to 3 points up to 5 points up to 7 points up to 11 points tournament clock no clock Tournament rules Turkish house rules Tapa (Plakoto without mana) change Pick the game, length, clock and rules yourself
Matches so far
- Between humans
- Between our computers (exhibition boards)
How strong is the computer?
PR is the usual measure of backgammon strength: the average error per decision, measured against a strong reference analysis. Lower is better. A club player is usually well above 10.
- Master
- For comparison: the strongest freely available engine (Sage, 1-ply)
Measured over 100 games against the same reference, with our own tool.
The number is for standard backgammon, where a neural net does the thinking. The regional variants are played by an open heuristic; there is no comparable reference for those, so no number is claimed.
Why there are computer players
So there is always an opponent: for the first game, for learning a variant, and for testing our rules. The computers also play each other in the open — the exhibition boards anyone can watch.
Games against a computer never move a rating. That closes every road from computer games to the leaderboard.
Nobody plays a computer without knowing it: every computer name wears the BOT tag wherever it appears, and a computer only ever sits down when you picked it yourself.