which is better to improve my game?

If you're a relative newcomer to backgammon, both programs will help you a lot to improve your game for quite some time. Either one plays at a world-class level, although Snowie is slightly better overall, and much better in the area of backgames.

For long-term development, Snowie can't be beat. Its array of features is fantastic and makes it well worth the price.

ty sir

Get gnubg.
It has more features than Snowie, plays a slightly stronger game and best of all is free and runs much faster.
It's also under constant development whereas Snowie is finished.

http://www.gnubg.org/

Jellyfish is outdated, so that is not an option anymore.

GNU is good(Free!)
Snowie is good, but expensive(365 USD).

Xtreemegammon is the newest program(50USD), and very strong. I would go for Xtreemegammon.

ExtremeGammon has some nice features not in the other programs. There's no independant data yet to determine whether and by how much it's stronger than the other bots. It's biggest asset is it's very fast as it was written in assembler language.

You can download a fully featured 14 day trial.

Could someone tell me what it is about JellyFish that makes it 'outdated'? Is it to do with its strength or just the lack of additional features? I use the free version so I don't have any experience with the extras that you pay for on it.

It's not. It's a good program for the money. Snowie is better, but costs a good deal more.

Thanks for the information. I'm planning to get Snowie when my budget permits, but that might be some time from now.

Incidentally, your 'Modern Backgammon' book really is fantastic. I'm working my way through it at the moment and it's definitely improved my game. I had never beaten JellyFish in a 13-point match beforehand. Thanks very much!

GNUBG is free and as strong as Snowie (imo). It's not all that user friendly, though, and graphics aren't too good either. www.gnubg.org

Extremegammon cost $50 and is also as strong (maybe even a little stronger) as Snowie and GNU, and has nice graphics and is user friendly. www.extremegammon.com

Michael Depreli has done an independent study of Snowie, GNUBG, and ExtremeGammon. The results are posted at http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbb...mes;read=65210

Snowie has not released a new version in several years, and with GNUBG free and ExtremeGammon only $50 there is absolutely no reason for anyone looking for a bot to shell out $360 for Snowie.

XG...

Snowie has a fabulous user interface and plays backgames and deep backgames very well. That's reason enough for me.

Even if you only mean that the hardcore quantitative modules (i.e. analysis and rollouts) were written in assembly, that's still quite impressive.

+1 to what zaphop said: Extreme Gammon is a beautiful bit of programming and knocks spots off all its competition for design and features. Try the trial demos of both snowie and XG and see for yourself.

first of all: bots deliver only discrete numbers. You need a compiler to translate in human syntax. Vision laughs at counting. One of the best compiling, "New Ideas in Backgammon", is based on jellyfish rollouts. Our mind doesn't work with numbers (if you are Jake Jakobs, perhaps). So you have to work first with books, that you understand the numbers: Danny Kleinman, Walter Trice, Bill Robertie, Kit Woolsey, Antonio Ortega, Paul Magriel, Jeremy Bagai and so on. Snowie is good, i worked with several years and i use still his diagramms. But it has a serious drawback. Even an old Pentium 4 machine is used only 50%. Extreme Gammon supports Multi Core machines and takes all what it can get. My machine has now a Core 2 Duo E5400 overclocked to 3,4 Ghz and get 320.000 positions a second. A regular core i7 machine can get 1.600.000 positions and an overclocked core i7 980 "Gulftown" 4.000.000 positions (online money game is busted!). I played several training matches against XG. He played also backgames, with fullflegded timing. And slotting and hitting plays sometimes which looked like the heydays of backgammon. So if Snowie would support multicore, perhaps deadrace, but without... But nevertheless, you have to first make your hands dirty before you go to the bots.

There is no longer any reason at all to buy Snowie.

Does GNU Backgammon have a level selector? I'm only interested in playing a computer if it's playing its strongest, but the only level selector I can find is for analysis.

When you start playing it straight after installation, is it in fact playing at its maximum strength?

Settings, Players (I expect that's what it's called. I'm translating from the Danish version). I believe the standard is 0-ply, which is not that strong (unless they have changed the standard since I downloaded it). You should change it to world class (or supremo if you have a fast comp, but world class is strong enough). Remember to do it for both cubeactions and checkerplays.

Thanks. I was wondering why I was beating it, and it turns out the computer was set only to the (not accurately titled) 'expert'. My netbook is quite fast, so I've changed the computer's setting to 'grandmaster' and 3-ply lookahead.

Good god, how on earth can you run these forums and recommend Snowie still. It's the end of 2010, Snowie is obsolete in the sense that nobody should be buying it and the few that have a good excuse to use it are few and far between.

To prove to anyone here before the hate replies come that Snowie is indeed outdated I will back GNU or eXtreme Gammon v. Snowie for real money, you name the stakes, equivalent high ply settings. Bill, you're welcome to accept.

Bill is deleting any posts he doesn't like btw. Any truthful posts like this one seem to be top on his radar.

Meow!

The most probable reason for getting posts deleted is that you posted the same link in multiple threads, and that link was unrelated to the topic of the thread. Earlier, I saw four threads with the same link in them, and it's possible that it got mass-deleted because it looked like spam.

Going from there to making accusations is a good way to get banned.

You did not see me post the same link in 4 different threads. I posted the same link in two threads and it was absolutely relative. I have the screen shots of everything posted and under what topic if you'd like some side action on that too.

Lol. A whale backed up jellyfish in a moneygame session against Nack Ballard and Mike Sienkiewicz. Break even. Set up a money session between snowie/xg, snowie/gnu and xg/gnu 10.000 games, and then come back. If the old turd jellyfish is able to break even against top notch players in a 600 play session, so what. And this will prove nothing, to bann a bot at all. Perhaps we will use XG, but on deep back games we switch to snowie, and so on. And look what Frank Berger of BGBlitz said about bot proramming and the difficulties to get it flying stable. To play good at backgammon, you need to develop a deep positional understanding. Rollouts are an experiment. You have to make it meaningful. Look at Problem #50 and the disput about rollout settings alone. I don't think, that snowie is way off, to make such a harsh judgement.