Walter Trice

by Douglas Zare
24 August 2009

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Walter Trice just passed away. I'm still reeling from the news. He was my friend and collaborator, a role model, and an advisor. For the past few years, I had the pleasure of chatting with him on the phone or Skype each Wednesday afternoon, talking about everything from backgammon to cycling to the Project Euler problems. I will miss him deeply.

I don't think I would be the right choice to write a single article on Walter Trice, or even his involvement with backgammon, since I only met him in 1999. I don't know how he got into backgammon, or how he became an expert. Others can much better describe his decades of play, his collaboration with other backgammon greats on (sometimes manual) rollout projects, his writings not just for GammonVillage but for backgammon periodicals around the country, and his programs such as the Bearoff Quizmaster. However, there doesn't have to be just one article, and I thought I'd mention a few of the projects I worked on with Walter.

New England Backgammon Club

Walter was the secretary of the New England Backgammon Club. In addition to writing the newsletter and keeping track of our members, Walter also ran many of our tournaments. He would generously decline the director's free entry to increase the prize pool, although he also won frequently. Walter was universally liked by the NEBC members, and at the December 2008 tournament, Doug and Wanda Roberts surprised him with a backgammon birthday cake, featuring a backgammon problem:


Click cake for larger image

The NEBC went through a couple of tough years. Our location had remodeled at an odd time, and a lot of our regulars didn't come back for a while, even though we still paid the full amount to rent the location, which meant we were losing money for years. If it hadn't been for Walter's efforts to bring back the regulars, it's quite possible that the NEBC would have folded. Our monthly tournaments are now back up to the levels where they were when I joined the NEBC.

Zbot

Walter and I have worked to make a new commercial backgammon program called Zbot. I worked on the design, training, and front end, while Walter worked on the trainer, the database, and the optimization. It has been a disappointment that we haven't released a version of Zbot yet, but we had a lot of fun and constructed backgammon programs which have insights into many aspects of backgammon not touched by available bots.

Initially, we recreated the success of Tesauro's TD Gammon, demonstrating that a neural net can learn to play decently from just a board encoding and a few tens of thousands of games of self-play. With the faster computers available, and the roadmap from Tesauro, it only takes a few minutes to see a neural net go from random play to making the 5 point. Out of curiosity, we adjusted the rules slightly, and trained neural nets to play several backgammon variants:

Backgammon with 5-sided dice.

Backgammon where getting hit loses.

Backgammon misere (the object is to bear off last).

The Greek backgammon variants feuga and plakoto.

At least one of the Acey-Deucey variants, where rolling 2-1 lets you play multiple doublets.

There are several ways Zbot is designed to be different from other bots. One is that Zbot's network structure is designed to hold more information. Zbot's brain is larger, holding many more parameters, while still being rapidly trainable. This means it has the ability to evaluate positions more accurately.

Second, while most bots estimate the cubeless backgammons, gammons, and wins, Zbot's networks are trained to predict cubeful equities, match play equities at scores like gammon-go, and other values such as wasted pips and the probability of closing your opponent out. We changed network structures several times, and in May we worked out the details for what should be the final structure, better at making cubeful estimates at distorted match scores like 3-away 8-away.

Third, the front end of Zbot is designed to make more useful information available so that people can more easily understand why play A might be recommended over play B, to get more information from an evaluation or a rollout. If you have 1 hour to spend studying backgammon with a bot, we want you to get the most out of that hour by using Zbot.

Zbot is a far more complicated project than we anticipated, and it has taken far more time to complete than we expected. Some parts work well, and have taught us a lot about backgammon, but some parts are still buggy, or are just too awkward to use. One of the options we were planning was releasing a limited version of Zbot first.

It's a practical impossibility to pick up someone else's code where they left off. We weren't even using the same languages, as he used PowerBasic and Visual Basic, while I use C#. I don't know what will happen to Zbot. Some pieces, such as the noncontact and contact bearoff databases can be used as they are. I may try to use Walter's successes as a roadmap of what things should work, while I write a new trainer for the final network structure.

Another book

Walter wrote a couple of books on backgammon, Can a Fish Taste Twice As Good with Jake Jacobs, about match play where one player is stronger than the other, and Backgammon Bootcamp based on his GammonVillage writings including his Beginners' Bootcamp series. Both of these books are for the backgammon niche market. You can find these books at backgammon tournaments, but not in Barnes & Noble.

There is still a lack of quality material aimed at the masses, e.g., for the Windows XP and later users who have found the Games -> Internet Backgammon from the start menu, but who wouldn't dream of spending a weekend at a backgammon tournament. Walter and I planned to write an introduction to modern backgammon for the masses.

We sent some outlines and sample chapters back and forth, although one of the questions was whether a book is the right format. We considered making a DVD instead, and recorded some test commentary on a match played between Nack Ballard and Gus Hansen, which Walter rolled out extensively for weeks.

I'm not sure whether anything will come from Walter's work on this book/DVD, but I thought it was good to pass on Walter's idea that backgammon is a great game, worth studying, which ought to be better known.

I learned a lot from Walter Trice. I will miss him, and the backgammon community will miss him.

Copyright Douglas Zare and GammonVillage.

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Article text Copyright © 1999-2010 Douglas Zare and GammonVillage Inc.

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Feedback about this article:

1.

Subject: Re: Walter Trice

From: Jammer   

Date: 24 Aug 2009 21:24 EST

Good article Doug! Very insightful with details not many in the community would know. Thanks!

Steve Schreiber

2.

Subject: Re: Walter Trice

From: poseidon   

Date: 26 Aug 2009 06:41 EST

Interesting article Douglas. I would like to ask whether the Zbot is or will be available for downloading, at least at a pilot version. I am mainly interested in the Greek backgammon playing machine.

3.

Subject: Re: Walter Trice

From: zare

Date: 26 Aug 2009 14:46 EST

Zbot is not currently available for downloading. Don't search for it since there are some unrelated programs with the same name which can be downloaded, but which will mess up your computer. For example, there is a program which I gather is used to cheat in multiplayer Quake games called Zbot, which upset some people enough to relabel viruses as Zbot to try to infect potential cheaters.

I do plan to release at least a plakoto program at some point. I believe Walter created a decent feuga program, but I'm not sure.

Although Walter won when he played for money on servers like GamesGrid and GammonEmpire, for years he seemed to prefer to pay to play on VOG, which offered many backgammon variants (and lots of beginners with mistakes to discuss in his columns). That's one of the reasons he created programs to play variants like Crazy Narde.

He mentioned a few other fun variants, like backgammon except you must move the lower number first, so that if only the 5 point is open, then 5-1 dances. He would also play fixed-dice backgammon, for use when the tournament director is talking and you can't roll the dice any more. So, you just continue to play your last roll on each turn. That turns the game into more of a chess game, but Walter was good at chess, too.

Douglas Zare

4.

Subject: Re: Walter Trice

From: PhilSimborg   

Date: 27 Aug 2009 10:18 EST

Backgammon players from all over the world have expressed their sadness at Walter's passing, and I have been asked by many to organize ideas for a tribute to Walter's memory. I am in contact with the leaders of the ABT and with members of Walter's family to discuss an appropriate tribute. I will be meeting with people at the upcoming Madison WI tournament and will report back to Walter's family to get their approval of what we recommend, and then will report publicly on this subject. If anyone would like to offer their ideas or comments, please email me at psimborg@inwk.com.

5.

Subject: Re: Walter Trice

From: trice

Date: 27 Aug 2009 13:17 EST

Thank you so much Doug for this article. I am limping along trying to adjust to a world without Walter. I wanted you to know you were a very important part of Walter's life and he spoke of you always with a wide grin. At 3pm every Wednesday he closed his office door and I knew not to disturb him until he was finished speaking with Doug Zare. Yesterday I closed his door just to honor that tradition...they broke the mold when they made my Walter.

Donna

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