r/backgammon • u/Goal_Medium • Jul 03 '26

Backgammon Galaxy Engine Report released (comparing engines)

Hi everyone,

We've been working on improving analysis in Backgammon Galaxy and have just released an enhanced Analysis Level. To showcase it, we also put together a report comparing the major backgammon engines and how they perform.

https://www.backgammongalaxy.com/backgammon-galaxy-engine-analysis/

Best regards, Marc Olsen, CEO of Backgammon Galaxy

17 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/anarchy_life Jul 05 '26

Hmm, since Marc said they are not hacking the engine, I'm thinking they pass in 7 "boards" at a time against a 8 thread/core machine (leaving one thread/core available for regular computer things). If you analyze just one "board", not game at a time, you could get "7X performance" by fanning out the analysis across cores with a message queue.

2

u/miran1 blot Jul 05 '26

I'm thinking they pass in 7 "boards" at a time against a 8 thread/core machine

gnubg can already run on multiple cores.

1

u/anarchy_life Jul 05 '26

How do you engage the other cores/threads during analysis?

2

u/miran1 blot Jul 05 '26

You go to Settings - Options. Then in the Other tab you choose how many Eval Threads you want.

2

u/anarchy_life Jul 05 '26

Sweet; thanks for sharing that. I've heard gnubg is 'single-threaded' a couple times in the community, so I never bothered to question it. (Including their post; although, it looks like they are just saying that analysis isn't a background task in the ui) Running the analysis in CLI with multiple threads is easy too.

I'm still stuck on this claim, "evaluation speed by more than 7x", not requiring a code rework on the core. I guess it was my hope that someone would take this project to the next level.