Slashdot Mirror

This is the most substantive bit I was able to find, a forum post by David Jian Wu from eariler today:

Thanks for the questions!

I can't even find a discussion of the winning games by someone who knows the game and its strategic evolution.

Interesting, but at present there's nothing much to discuss here.

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/chall...

The Arimaa Challenge

The Arimaa Challenge was won on April 18, 2015 and is no longer available. This page exists for historical purpose

Currently the best Arimaa players are humans

What gives?

I like abstract strategy games, but I don't like heavy memorization. Chess is popular so it's easy to find opponents, but memorizing the opening book is necessary if you want to get good. It's also very easy for weaker players to lose the game from a single blunder, which is unsatisfying for everybody. Arimaa was designed to be difficult for computers because of the very high branching factor, and that same property also makes it interesting for humans.

Arimaa can be played on a Chess board, and the rules are simple. Memorization is completely useless. You're forced to use intuition, in a way more like Go than Chess. There are no draws. Comebacks from inferior material are much more common than in Chess. It feels like Chess without the boring bits. It's still too new to tell if it's a truly great abstract strategy game, but people are already playing it at a very high level with no obvious flaw in the rules. I recommend trying it:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/

I don't know about the chess championship, but that is one of the best blogs on the internet. Where did it come from? In a world of 7-second attention spans, "you won't believe what happens next....", and pop culture domination, here is a guy who is talking about math, computers, and games in a friendly relaxed manner, because it is interesting to him. He talks about Godel (who apparently said, "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not"), some recent ideas in information theory, and a comparison between linear algebra and quantum computing. He uses LaTeX.

Also, from the post I learned about a game called Arimaa, which was designed to be hard for computers but easy for people. There is a bet that no computer will be able to beat a human, and you can win thousands of dollars if you do. So far it's apparently not even close. Also, got this great quote: "It’s not that chess is 99% tactics, it’s just that tactics takes up 99% of your time."

Seems that this is an April fools joke. http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=other;action=display;num=1333376498

Because in the bigger view, most games in these categories will eventually be playable by computers - it's only because chess was so famous that the proper programming theory developed in with advances in comp science.

Arimaa is a game designed to take the place of chess. It can be played with a chess board and pieces, and there's been a $10,000 challenge to develop an AI that can beat a top human player. The challenge has been around for a long time, and is good through the year 2020.

Computers may overtake humans in Go, just because we've seen human ability has already pretty much peaked in the game. It was a hugely popular game 50 years ago, but kids aren't learning it and playing it today. So, we already know what mark AI has to meet.

Arimaa is still growing in popularity. The champions today are much better than those 10 years ago, and dominant strategies among top players are still being debated and changed. Even though the game can be brute-force searched easier than Go, I think humans will hold the edge in it considerably longer than Go.

See Arimaa , a new game with a board and set similar to Chess *but* with specific rules made to be difficult for a computer to play, and easy for a child.

How many options do you have when it's your turn to play with chess ? The average branching factor in a game of Chess is about 35, whereas in Arimaa it is about 17281 !
This is why a computer which can search to a depth of eight turns for each player in chess, can only search about three turns deep for each player in Arimaa...

This game is the new challenge for IA, easy for a child, difficult for a computer. A average human player wins against best programs.

Flash 7 is incredibly stable.

I tried playing this onling game Arimaa with it, and while it would work for a while, it would always eventually crash. It was a well known problem with the Linux Flash 7 player.

I've also been to plenty of sites that just don't work right, for whatever reason. Flash 7 just isn't the same quality as the Windows version. They totally skipped version 8 for Linux. Any bets on the timeliness and quality of version 9 for Linux? Proprietary formats are bad. We need an open standard!

Check out Arimaa. It's a game based on positional intelligence in stark contrast to brute force adaptive space searching that a chess engine uses. What is positional intelligence? Don't know, you gotta play it to learn it. But one thing that has been demonstrated so far is that a beginner human player has a good chance of beating the best computer player yet devised. And Arimaa has the same depth that is intrinsic within chess as well - your rating as a player ranges from novice to grandmaster. Positional intelligence has yet to pan out but one thing is proven by Arimaa, a new approach is needed to when dealing with the evaluation of the rules of it's game.

For those chess players who want a game that can be played on a normal chessboard with a normal chess set but is as difficult for computers to play as Go, I suggest they look at Arimaa. Like Go, the rules are incredibly simple and take minutes to learn, but the game is far from being well understood.

It sounds so easy, but no one has done it yet.

http://arimaa.com/

Scott

http://arimaa.com/

Many people dont know about this game yet. But, it uses a standard chess set and is 1000x harder for computers than chess. I've tried it and was able to beat the computer; something I've never been able to do with chess.

http://www.arimaa.com/

Scott

http://www.arimaa.com/

Hi Davak,

Please see this site:

• http://arimaa.com/arimaa

I thought about this question for a long time while restricting the game to use only a standard chess set.

Omar