I’ve never played a game of backgammon.  It was always one of those board games that you couple play on the underside of the chess board that Aunt Tilda got you for Christmas.  I don’t really know the rules, but I know you get to play with some pretty sweet dice cups, and that’s almost enough to make me want to learn.

You know who loves playing backgammon, apparently?  Computers.  I was surprised, too, but it turns out that backgammon is (likely somewhat distant) second to chess as a game that interests computer scientists.  Apparently racing checkers around a horseshoe of points is a practical way for researchers to build and study neural networks, or artificial brains.  According to my sources (Google), the first formidable computer backgammon opponent, BKG 9.8, was first tested in 1970.  At first, ol’ BKG was pretty sorry, losing to even crappy backgammon players.  But his creators studied his mistakes and applied principles of “fuzzy logic” to his strategy.  By 1979, BKG 9.8 was good enough to challenge the human world backgammon champ.

Thirty years later, anybody can buy a powerful handheld backgammon computer for less than the cost of a decent board.  Better start practicing now—pretty soon the computers are going to start charging us for lessons.