[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.