Who
Who’s behind Raccoon?
Development
Raccoon is built by me, Lasse Hjorth Madsen, as a product from my small research company, Tekst og tal (English: Text and Numbers).
The training pipelines and every experiment write-up are public and MIT-licensed, available at the project’s research site.
The work combines two long interests: applied machine learning, and backgammon, a game whose strongest engines have not been rebuilt with modern methods in twenty-five years.
Lots of links
Many more details about the project (and about me) are available on other sites:
- LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/lassehjorthmadsen
- GitHub — github.com/lassehjorthmadsen
- The engine — github.com/lassehjorthmadsen/raccoon — the network, training pipelines and every experiment write-up, MIT-licensed.
- This website — github.com/lassehjorthmadsen/raccoon-website — including the browser port of the engine and the tests that gate its deploy.
- Research site research.raccoonbg.com.
- Danish company register (CVR) — Tekst og tal, CVR 34101302 — the official public record of the company behind this site.
- Personal site — tekstogtal.dk (In Danish, but with an English speaking digital twin to chat with.)
- Email — hello@raccoonbg.com
How we work
Everything is measured, and everything is published. Each experiment states one hypothesis, fixes one primary metric before the run, and reports every checkpoint against it with sample sizes and confidence intervals. The write-ups include the experiments that failed, the conclusions later retracted, and the measurement bugs found in our own evaluation code. In a domain where effect sizes are small and noise is large, a result without its error bar is not a result.
The code is open. The engine, training pipelines and evaluation harnesses are MIT-licensed and public. Game rules come from OpenSpiel; every line of the machine learning and search code is written from scratch.
Training runs on Google Cloud — preemptible GPU instances for network training, Cloud Storage for datasets and checkpoints.
Get in touch
Email — hello@raccoonbg.com. Bug reports and questions about the engine are best filed as issues.
We are especially interested in hearing from:
- Front-end and UI developers. The board on this site is deliberately minimal, and a polished interface is not on our roadmap — we would rather expose the engine well and let someone who does interfaces build the interface.
- Backgammon players and analysts with labelled position sets, rollout archives, or match databases we could benchmark against.
- Researchers working on stochastic games, distillation, or search-free evaluation.
- Tool authors who would like to embed the engine — it already speaks a UCI-style text protocol built for exactly that. See How.
Company details
| Legal name | Tekst og tal |
| Registration | CVR 34101302 (public record) |
| Country | Denmark |
| Contact | hello@raccoonbg.com |
| Product | Raccoon Backgammon — play it here |
| Status | Pre-revenue research and development; the engine is open source |