Backgammon Program: Snowie

Until mid-1998, Jellyfish was the sole top- level backgammon program for Windows, with TD Gammon providing equally masterful play on OS/2. Compared with Jellyfish and TD Gammon, most if not all standalone backgammon programs pale.

Now there is another off-line expert neural net contender for your money. The FIBS bot Snowie has been converted for standalone operation. Written by Olivier Egger (oegger@lcavsun1.epfl.ch, oegger on FIBS, URL: http://ltswww.epfl. ch/Staff/egger.html) of Switzerland, Snowie is sold by Oasya SA, which operates the official Snowie Web site.

To differentiate the FIBS bot and the commercial Windows program, I'm calling the latter "standalone Snowie" on this site.

The full version of standalone Snowie (Snowie Professional) was released in July 1998. It appears to have been written with Jellyfish's (albeit minor) shortcomings in mind, including:

Easy-to-use, integrated rollout facility
Export of matches to HTML, ASCII, and RTF (Rich Text Format)
Substantial equity information - see the Web site for details
Textured graphics (if you like that sort of thing)

There will be at least two versions:

Snowie Professional (available now)
Snowie Player (release date not known)

At the moment, it seems there's no freeware or shareware download option.

A one-point version of Snowie used to play on FIBS under the name SnowWhite.

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