Okay, not really a review this time. But I want to tell you a bit more about my engine, and how to play against it.
It started with my “DailyGammon blunder quiz app” called “Second Roll”. Having only little free time, I play all my matches on DailyGammon where you can make a few moves a day and still enjoy this game. Then I had the idea to learn from my mistakes. So I built an app purely for DailyGammon users. The app reads your past matches, analyses them with a state of the art backgammon engine, and presents your blunders to you as multiple choice quizzes.
As the engine I was using Gnu Backgammon. Free, strong, but hard to program against. I was unhappy with its limitations – couldn’t get cube evaluations to work. And I want to quiz cube blunders. I am so bad (SO BAD) at the cube.
So I went for the beautiful HedgeHog engine. Threw out Gnu, added HedgeHog (all, of course, vibe coded with the latest Claude AI). Was happier, but not very happy. The free client-based engine plays around PR 3 to 4, and you can’t get it to think deeper.
And in these strange times of software development, all you need to do is to ask an AI to build a fast, strong backgammon engine, give it a bit of guidance here and there, train the neural network in its heart for days with millions of positions, and you have your own engine. Mine is called “Dark B. G. Helmet” (my alias in most backgammon sites is dark helmet), and it does well against Gnu, and is regularly evaluated by BGBlitz and XG2 as having a superhuman PR of below 1. Never a single blunder in hundreds of games.
Now I had an engine, and a quiz app with a board.
It took Claude an hour or so, and I had a fully working app, with
- An engine that plays at superhuman level, as strong as the best ones.
- Match play (only) – matches from 1 to 25 points.
- Playing strength from 1-ply to 4-ply thinking (locally my Mac can go to 6-ply, but not on my little server).
- Tutor tells you about problems.
- Review and analysis of every move with up to 4-ply search, incl. marking blunders (see update below)
- App rates your PR
- Match list incl. export as “.mat” files
- Graphical performance overview
- Light and dark mode
And here’s the “proof” – a random game I played today analysed by BGBlitz 4-ply (yes I am proud of my performance as well 🙂 ) – a PR of 0.98 is not too bad.
Please note: if one very strong engine analyses the performance of another strong engine, the numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt – BGBlitz is also not playing perfect.
So, what do I do with it? The app is fully multi-user-enabled, but my VPS is not the fastest one and serves other apps as well… On the other side it is, according to my knowledge, the strongest totally free engine available with a web UI.
So, if this caught your interest and you want to give it a try – it is 100% free, 100% protecting your privacy, and will always be – I am not doing this for money, but for the fun of it – drop me a mail at secondroll@agsteiner.de and I will send you the URL and an access code so you can use it.
Update – now with analysis
Claude built me this nice analysis function. Unfortunately I can only make half of it publicly available – locally on my Mac I can do analysis up to 7-ply and rollout, but the server I’m running the app on is not up to such a load.