Development of an Artificial Intelligent Software Agent using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Techniques to play Backgammon Variants

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence has seen enormous progress in many disciplines in the recent years. Particularly, digitalized versions of board games require artificial intelligence application due to their complex decision-making environment. Game developers aim to create board game software agents which are intelligent, adaptive and responsive. However, the process of designing and developing such a software agent is far from straight forward due the nature and diversity of each game. The thesis examines and presents a detailed procedure of constructing a software agent for backgammon variants, using temporal difference, artificial neural networks and backpropagation. Different artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms used in board games, are overviewed and presented. Finally, the thesis describes the development and implementation of a software agent for the backgammon variant called Swedish Tables and evaluates its performance.