This was written back in 2009. Some of the references are out of date, and the insights seem more commonplace now. I can’t tell if that’s because they’ve been borne out by time, or that they were obvious all along.
Backgammon is an ancient game, perhaps the oldest in the world.
Despite the fact that the inner workings of the game โ the rules of checker movement โ are obviously of human invention, the obscurity of their providence and their sheer simplicity almost makes them akin to natural physical laws, applying themselves to the minimalistic universe of the backgammon board.
Like the physical world, too, backgammon might seem to us to behave as an intractable mixture of determinism and randomness. Reports of games very similar, but presumably genetically unrelated, to backgammon being played by native people in the New World by the first European explorers might suggest that backgammon-like games represent a natural class of game to emerge from the mathematics of probability and position.
Because the study of this world โ the science of backgammon โ may be pursued for both fun and (gambling) profit, it too has a long history. And curiously, this natural philosophy follows a similar path to investigations of the broader universe.