I'm playing a game of Chinese chess on brainking now actually. Though I just reliazed that I may have ran out of time on the game. I haven't checked brainking in a couple weeks

If anyone is willing to teach me I would love to learn how to play backgammon. Never known but always wanted to.

I learned backgammon (Tavla, in our household) relatively recently, and was interested for a bit, before I stumbled across

Jellyfish

, a tiny neural-net backgammon game that self-trained by being turned loose on the online servers.

It can stomp me. (and just about everyone else, for that matter). This isn't a fancy supercomputer, and it doesn't have fancy algorithms and a billion lines of code. Being schooled by a software-AI equivalent of a barely multi-cellular organism takes the shine of a bit. I mean it isn't even close to say, flatworm level... I could handle being compared unfavourably to a flatworm.

Now I realise that refusing to play games that simple computers can beat me at doesn't leave much. There are a handful, usually with enough turn-options that we can overwhelm the computing power currently available. Interestingly, this forces coders to try more elegant, less mathematical brute-force approaches, which tend to push the envelope of what might one day be true AI...

For now, at least, I recommend GO (Wei-chi, Baduk).

IGOwin

is a decent (simple 9x9) introduction, while

GnuGo

plays the more interesting full sized board. You'll need a gui for GnuGo - follow the links.

Matthias