The tutorbot begins to take shape

 I've named my custom GPT the "Backgammon Tutorbot". 

It's now getting a bit better. You can tell it a position in text, like "show me the starting position", and it knows what that means, shows you a proper image of the position, and internally knows what checker layout it corresponds to.

You can then (slowly!) step through a game. If you ask it, for example, "show me the position after a 5-1", it'll call the backgammon bot Python code to figure out the best move for a 5-1, then show you an image of the resulting position, with a bit of commentary. And it remembers the new position as the current one.

Next, if you say "show me the position after the opponent rolls a 6-2", it'll figure out the opponent's best 6-2, then show you an image of that position, with some commentary.

And so on, until the game is over (or you hit the GPT-4 time cap, which I did a bunch).

So it's getting better at the mechanics of representing and advancing a real game. It's quite interesting to use the chat interface as the UI rather than a traditional application. In some ways it's much slower - but it's also chatting in regular English, with a lot of flexibility about how you actually ask your questions. The chatbot is very good at dealing with that kind of flexibility.

But it's still not very good at commentary yet. I've tried uploading one doc with human discussions of opening moves, but that's very early still, and no results to report.