The First Internet Backgammon Server (FIBS) began operating on July 19, 1992, allowing users to play

backgammon Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back nearly 5,000 years to the regions of Mesopotamia and Pe ...

in real-time against other people. It was hosted on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, and could track player performance using a modified version of the

Elo rating system The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved ch ...

. It was created by Andreas "Marvin" Schneider in 1992. It has been maintained since 1996 by Patti Beadles. Anyone with access to the Internet can create a username and play for free. FIBS caters to a strong international community of backgammon players. It was an immediate success, and no other backgammon server came online until 1997.

Game play

Early users connected to FIBS via a

command line interface A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

through

TELNET Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

similar to a

MUD A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain) is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-bas ...

, with the standard backgammon board drawn in

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

text.

Dice Dice (singular die or dice) are small, throwable objects with marked sides that can rest in multiple positions. They are used for generating random values, commonly as part of tabletop games, including dice games, board games, role-playing g ...

rolls are represented numerically and moves are performed by entering starting and ending point numbers, similar to standard

backgammon notation Backgammon notation is a means for recording backgammon games, developed by Paul Magriel in the 1970s. The common way of describing the movement of checkers involves numbering the points around the board from 24 to 1 as depicted in Figure 1. Th ...

. Other game related commands are available by typing the appropriate command. The first

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

s for FIBS were developed in 1994; FIBS/W for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and MacFIBS for the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

. Graphical interfaces continue to be developed for most major computing platforms, including mobile phones and tablets, however telnet remains the underlying protocol for FIBS. This allows anyone with access to the Internet to log into FIBS regardless of platform.

Bots The British Overseas Territories (BOTs), also known as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs), are fourteen territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom. They are the last remnants of the former Bri ...

have been developed, some based on

neural net Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

programs like gnubg, JellyFish,

TD-Gammon TD-Gammon is a computer backgammon program developed in 1992 by Gerald Tesauro at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Its name comes from the fact that it is an artificial neural net trained by a form of temporal-difference learning, specif ...

, and Snowie, to allow human players to compete with these computer programs on FIBS and to analyze these programs' performance in real-world play. This is one way FIBS has served as an experimental platform for the advancement of computer science and continues to do so. The server provided the first opportunity for backgammon players to be rated on the

first devised for chess. The server has been used for testing

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

concepts using the backgammon bot ''LGammon'', written by Mark Land of the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

Community

FIBS supports communication between players via text messages using the "shout" command which broadcasts to all players, in-game using the "kibitz" or "whisper" commands, and privately using the "tell" command. The "shout" command was initially implemented as a way for a player to find an opponent but has developed into a method of communicating with the general FIBS population. Users have a range of options to filter the amount of text messaging they receive, from ignoring troublesome users (with the "gag" command) to fully blocking receipt of all "shout" messages (using the "toggle silent" command). FIBS has a thriving program of tournaments and leagues, run by Tourneybot, which is supplied and maintained by Tom Moulton.

References

External links

* {{tables games Backgammon video games

Game play

Community

See also

References

External links