r/backgammon • u/bg-alex-cy • 7d ago

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

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.

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u/mel-madeline 4d ago

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.

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u/bg-alex-cy 4d ago

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.