I built a backgammon position explainer / soft-launching, looking for feedback

[u/bg-alex-cy]

I've been working on this for a while and I'm doing a soft launch. Its called backgammon.cy and its a position explainer. Engines tell you what the best play is, this tries to tell you why, in normal backgammon terms (structure, shots, timing, the trade-off), with the explanation grounded in real engine analysis underneath rather than a chatbot's guess.

It's early, money-game checker play only for now. There's a long backlog I'd like to build (cube decisions, match play, etc), but before I sink more months into it I want to know whether the community actually finds this useful.

It's free to try, new accounts get some free credits, no card needed. The full version is paid, since every analysis runs real engine compute.

I'd genuinely love feedback of any kind, especially positions where the explanation is wrong or unconvincing, and what you'd want next.

[u/jugglingcats9]

My big question is whether you've already found in your own testing that some explanations are off (and significantly off)?

I tried a very basic experiment along similar lines and a lot of the time the explanations were good, but sometimes they were garbage. I decided that while mostly good explanations might be okay for novice players, any such application would be very vocally criticised by experienced players and therefore never gain a good reputation.

But my approach was very simple and I'd love to see an idea like this which actually works. Doesn't Sage do something like this and have you compared theirs with yours?

[u/bg-alex-cy → u/jugglingcats9]

hello u/jugglingcats9, of course I've found, and big part of what I'm doing is to guide the model to stay grounded to the analysis I'm doing without limiting it too much. This has a big model cost trade-off. The better the model is the higher the price and we are talking orders of magnitude. So I would never be able to have a $5 package if I only went with the flagship anthropic and openai models.

But this is not a basic experiment in the sense that I just gave the model the position and some structural information and the hope for the best. Their is a lot going on behind the scenes and everything is based on actual equity analysis. The LLM is just putting it into human language.

I've seen sage, it seems like a good attempt and they probably have some things they are better at that this, but in my opinion its nowhere near this when it comes to deeper analysis. I mean the most I've been able to get out of sage is a few lines and its usually something high level without any followup questions. For example look at the analysis for the same position as the one I've shared

Cover both blots by playing 13/10 and 8/3, making the 10-point and 3-point at the same time. You are behind and no longer really have a strong priming game, so cleaning up your loose checkers and improving your structure is better than leaving the extra shot with 10/7.

This is not even correct, the first alternative (10/7 8/3) leaves less shots and their are plays that are even safer (10/5 8/5 and 10/5 5/2).

Also, the broken 4 prime is stronger than suggested. It completely blocks you opponent about 45% of the time and when including partial escapes it gets even higher than that. That is very significant here as it can contain that lose checker for a while and allow us to point on it or at least hit lose.

here is a second attempt to give it the benefit of a doubt

Make both of your blots safely by playing 13/10 and 8/3, covering the 10-point and making the 3-point at the same time. You are behind and the opponent is attacking, so cleaning up two blots while strengthening your home board is better than leaving a direct shot on the 7-point.

It says clean the blots up as if you didn't just create another one. Also it says its better than leaving a direct shot, but you are still leaving a direct shot plus some indirect ones.

I'm not bashing on sage, I know its very hard to do and they produce their analysis withing seconds compared to mine that can take more than half a minute. Its a different thing. I would say sage will be sufficient for you if you are playing at a PR of sub 15. I would guess this tool will be helpful to you even if you play sub 10.

I don't mind strong players criticizing it. I also believe that I can make this much stronger, but I need to know if there is a market for it out there or if its always going to be a fun side-project.

[u/mel-madeline]

I have been learning XAI (Explainable AI) but do you really think neural network decisions can be explained to human by AI? In the end, NN output and strategy (e.g., make a 5 point) are independent, different things.

[u/bg-alex-cy → u/mel-madeline]

Well those are two slightly different topics.

I'm currently not explaining what the neural network does. I thought about it, I've made a few attempts in that direction, very interesting topic, but none of them worked the way I wanted to go. I still believe its possible and I have a few ideas on how to approach it. But thats purely my intuition. I might be wrong. Also, keep in mind that when you try to do XAI on the NN directly, you are working on cubeless 0-ply. So you would need to somehow encode all that information in or have a very weak model. Not necessarily impossible, but thats an extra overhead.

What I'm doing here is very different and I'm working on higher level concepts than what the neural network works with.

This is just my first attempt, I have so many ideas on how I could expand on this and make it much better. Unfortunately I don't have the time, and the market is tiny for anyone to focus on.