Enumerating Backgammon Positions: The Perfect Hash
Arthur T. Benjamin, Andrew M. Ross · Scholarship @ Claremont (The Claremont Colleges) · 1997
Like many games, people place money wagers on backgammon games. These wagers can change during the game. In order to make intelligent bets, one needs to know the chances of winning at any point in the game. We were working on this for positions near the end of the game when we needed to explicitly label each of the positions so the computer could refer to them. The labeling developed here uses the least possible amount of computer memory, is reasonably fast, and works well with a technique known as dynamic programming.