[Houshalter]

It's basically the same algorithm, or at least very similar. The main difference is they use huge neural networks running on GPUs, and they feed it raw video data, rather than the game board state directly.

It's not any less impressive though, to my knowledge no one had done anything like that before. That is, beating video games with raw video data and reinforcement learning.

[jessriedel]

Did they hard-code the rules of backgammon into the software, or only the board state? I think there's a sort of conceptual ladder visual input --> game state --> games rules --> game strategy and it's very important to specify which rungs the software started on.

[Houshalter]

Just the position of the pieces on the board. They did give it some other features to help it. I forget what they were though, but just simple stuff that was calculated directly from the board state.

[JabavuAdams]

From what I've read, DeepMind's approach is to just feed in the raw pixel data and the score. No rules, or anything like that.