Programming

Forum Archive : Programming

 
Training neural nets

From:   Walter Trice
Address:   waltertrice@worldnet.att.net
Date:   18 November 2000
Subject:   Re: Frankly, I think snowie and jellyfish are fascinating
Forum:   rec.games.backgammon
Google:   olCR5.3135$BL.246912@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net

The Snowie and Jellyfish designers don't seem inclined to reveal all the
nitty-gritty details, but some useful things have been published. The book
"Reinforcement Learning" by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto gives a
good treatment of the theory without a lot of unnecessary mathematics, and
includes a section on TD-Gammon (the first decent neural-net BG program.)
Also a couple of articles appeared in Inside Backgammon (back issues still
available, I believe) -- "Neural Nets," by Brian Sheppard, and "Inside
Jellyfish," by Frederick Dahl.

Basically the programs are "nothing more ;-)"  than neural nets trained by
a temporal difference method WITHOUT supervision.

And if you want to see some actual code you could hunt down Gary Wong's
gnuBG. A google search will give you lots of links.

--Walter Trice
 
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Programming

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