Interview with Jon Kinsey of GNUBG
 

How did you get involved in GNUBG?
About 8 years ago I was working on a network based system and needed to write a test program that checked the communication system. I decided to write a backgammon program to test this out, and then spent many hours testing our system with my co-developer Pete Lockwood. Neither of us knew how to play and I decided to write a program that would play against me to help hone my playing skills. I’d recently written an Othello computer game and adapted that to play backgammon as well. Here’s a screen shot of both games:

In 2002 I decide to learn how to program with openGL (a 3d graphics library), and at the time thought I would add a 3d view of the backgammon board to my backgammon game. Whilst working on this I stumbled across gnubg and after trying it out I was really impressed at how advanced it was (compared to a few other backgammon programs I tried at the time). So I sent an email to see if they would want a 3d board, so here ended “my backgammon” and started my involvement in gnubg. Here is a very early screen shot of my 3d board in development from 2003:

By 2004 it was complete and integrated with gnubg and looked like this:

My interest in the project grew from this and I have made many improvements to all areas of gnubg since then.

Can you tell us about the history of GNUBG?
The project started with Gary Wong in 1999, he had written several simple backgammon bots and took his neural network coding and started to develop a desktop backgammon program - gnubg. His decision to open source this project as part of the GNU system meant that other people could join in and help develop the open source code. Joseph Heled started working with Gary in 1999 on improving the playing engine. Joern Thyssen and Oystein Johansen also played a large part in the project from 2000.

As the project is voluntary people come and go as there interest and free time varies. By 2004 Gary had largely stopped working on the project, I joined the team in 2005 and worked closely with Joern and Oystein. Joseph stopped his great work on the neural nets in about 2006, and Joern interests switched to poker. In recent times Christian Anthon has taken over the mantle and I’m trying my best to help out as well.

What have been the biggest challenges you have faced in its development?
As I’m primarily a windows developer a big challenge was getting gnubg to build and work well on Microsoft Windows. That and the quite ad-hoc nature of the project, with lots of people working in their own way has been the most challenging.

If you could change one thing about GNUBG what would it be?
Everything! Large parts of the code could ideally do with being rewritten. In a perfect world the code would be structured into separate areas that would allow for much easier development.

How long will you continue to develop GNUBG?
As long as it remains a fun challenge. I have been less involved over the last year or so but am definitely keen to step that up and finish some of the things I’ve started and have plans to do.

What more would you like to do with GNUBG?
Gnubg has traditionally been versioned depending on the playing engine, so there was 0.14, 0.15, 0.16 which correspond to the 14th, 15th etc version of the neural nets. As the neural nets are currently stable we have moved to a version system that is working towards a “version 1” of the system. The current version is 0.90 and we may have a couple more releases, 0.91, 0.92 say, until hopefully we’ll release a version 1.0.

The main item outstanding for me is improving the match database to add reports and graphs.

What new features would you like to see implemented?
Anyone who has used gnubg would realise that it has more features than most people will ever use, the main goal for me is to rationalize the current feature set whilst simplifying the use of gnubg.

We receive a lot of comments as to how hard it is to download GNUBG. I gather you are going to post up a new download page shortly. When might this be and will it be user friendly?
We’ve kind of been able to hide behind the fact that gnubg is still technically a beta product, when we get to a version 1 system the website should be much easier to use with a straightforward one-click download (at least for windows).


How do you think GNUBG's compares to Snowie and BGBlitz and what do you think GNUBG offers that they do not?
I think it compares very well (not that I’m exactly unbiased), the playing strength, features and ease of use are at least comparable if not better in many areas.

Of course gnubg is free in cost, I think this actually puts some people off (as they assume it’s can’t be very good if it’s free).

I’ve not used BGBlitz, I think it might have a few features missing that gnubg and Snowie have, I know Frank Berger does a great job developing this on his own.
Snowie is a tricky one, as it’s not really being developed and is expensive.

And as I wrote the 3d graphics, I’d have to say they are much better than any other product!

What do you do outside of programming GNUBG?
I’m a computer programmer, currently writing financial systems with Sungard. I am quite sporty and really enjoy Ultimate Frisbee (although I’m getting a bit old for it). I try and play backgammon when I get the chance!
 

Published 11th October 2008