Arimaa
Arimaa
An absolutely excellent game. They have a flash tutorial that explain the rules extremely well, and takes next to no time to learn the intuitively elegant rules. They provide a practice board for play which is quite nice if you have a buddy next to you. However, as they say, it's easy to set up with a regular chess board and pieces.
Arimaa was designed so that it could be played with a standard chess set and would not require any special equipment. However the rules of the game are not at all like those of Chess. The rules of Arimaa were chosen to be as simple and intuitive as possible while at the same time making the game interesting to play and yet difficult for computers.
Rather interesting for techies is that the game is extremely difficult for computers to play effectively. In fact, they posted a $10,000 challenge for anyone to produce a bot capable of beating an expert player.
In 1968 David Levy, an International Master made a $3,000 bet with John McCarthy, a distinguished researcher in Artificial Intelligence, that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won the bet, but it spurred a lot of interest in developing chess playing programs. In a similar challenge, we are posting a reward of $10,000 USD to the first computer program that defeats our chosen human representative in an official Arimaa match before the year 2020. It is our hope that Arimaa along with this challenge will promote research in the Artificial Intelligence community to seek new and different approaches to the difficult problem of teaching computers to play strategy games and shift the focus away from the standard look ahead approach such as that used by Deep Blue.
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