What is JellyFish?

Dice

JellyFish is a neural net based backgammon program that plays at a very high level. On the highest playing level it matches the best humans in the world, and on the very fast level 5 a top human will hardly win more than 55% of the time. Also, its use of the doubling cube is outstanding. JellyFish is able to play matches of any length, or 'money games' where each point is equally valuable.

JellyFish uses artificial neural networks, trained to play backgammon from self play. An artificial neural network is a model of how the human brain works on the level of individual brain cells. Fredrik Dahl developed the neural nets of JellyFish, and used the neural net compiler nn from Neureka ANS.

This program can be used for fun, for testing your game, for analyzing recorded matches, or most importantly: To improve your game.

JellyFish can give a running commentary on the moves and cube decisions you make. You may play against JellyFish, or use the "2 Players" mode to have JellyFish keep track of the score and comment on both opponents play. It's almost like having your own private professional to comment on your game.

There are four different versions of JellyFish:

	Light	Player	Tutor	Analyzer
Rollouts Set up any position to have JellyFish play it thousands of times for an excact analyze
Interactive rollouts Play one or both sides of a position, use JellyFish to calculate an excact analyze
Comments Have JellyFish tell you when you make a bad move or a wrong cube decision
Suggest moves Get a list of all legal moves for a given roll, sorted by equity for player on roll
Evaluations Calculate both players equity for any position
Editing Set up any position for furter analyzis
Files Saving and loading positions, games and matches
Full playing strength Play against JellyFish on 7 different levels

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JellyFish Light 3.5 is only available as freeware download
JellyFish Player 3.5 is commercially available, while the previous release (3.0) is available as freeware download
JellyFish Tutor 3.5 is only commercially available
JellyFish Analyzer 3.5 is only commercially available

Why did we call it "JellyFish"?

The name JellyFish comes from the neural net that the program is build over. A neural net is a simulation of a biologic brain, and like a human, JellyFish has learned the strategy of backgammon by experience, by playing itself a very large number of games.

The human brain, however, contains more than 100.000.000.000 neurons, and this is not possible to include into a computer program. The size of our programs "brain" is more the size of some of the lower organism - like a jellyfish.

But - our JellyFish is hopefully a better backgammon player than the jellyfish you find in the sea...

System requirements:

JellyFish requires a PC running Windows95 or Windows NT
8 MB RAM
i486 processor (Pentium recommended for maximum benefit)
2 MB Disk space
CD-ROM Player