{"id":846,"date":"2026-10-18T07:29:59","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T07:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/?page_id=846"},"modified":"2026-10-19T09:15:32","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T09:15:32","slug":"dark-b-g-helmet-my-own-backgammon-web-app","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/gammonrants.org\/index.php\/dark-b-g-helmet-my-own-backgammon-web-app\/","title":{"rendered":"AI built me a superhuman backgammon engine, free to use"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My engine in a web UI.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It started with my “DailyGammon<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I went for the beautiful HedgeHog<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I had an engine, and a quiz app with a board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Making a move<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It took Claude an hour or so, and I had a fully working app, with <\/p>\n\n\n\n