Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Arimaa challenge is going to be mantained until January first of the year
2020...

It is not exactly a Chess variant, but this game is excellent!.

I agree that this game is excellent.  I did a review of it in Abstract
Games Magazine #16.  

When I first came across the game, I assumed that it was similar to
ShouDouQi(the Jungle Game).  But it plays quite different.

Like ShouDouQi, Arimaa deserves a page at ChessVariants.

Z-Man Games will be publishing Arimaa:
http://www.zmangames.com/boardgames/arimaa.htm

Take note, Chess Variant community.  This is a chance for you to get new
variant pieces!

I reviewed this game for Abstract Games Magazine, and helped optimize the Zillions implementation. [I recently downloaded the implementation from the game's site and it throws an error message about being unable to render 'board.bmp'(not my creation ;-)). I simply screen-captured the image in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and replaced the original bitmap. I'm sending this correction now.]

I love this game. It's simple and complex. It does resist computer quantification. In fact, its developer has a challenge, which includes a financial reward, to any programmer who can code a program that will play this game well enough to defeat three human opponents(see site for details).

There are also several academic papers at the site about Arimaa and computer programming. This should give the interested a serious heads-up about the task.

I'm sure that it will eventually be quantified. It will be interesting if it occurs before 2020.

Arimaa does not strike me as a game that would be difficult for computers, once you realize that it is basically a normall chess/checkers-like game where each side is allowed to make 4 moves in a row on every turn.

I once read the conjecture that the only reason Arimaa programs are weak is that hardly anyone is interested in building a strong one. Most chess programs also have ratings of 1300 or less, and Arimaa programs just never get beyond that stage.

You might check out Chapter 2 of Analysis and Implementation of the Game Arimaa by Christ-Jan Cox (Universiteit Maastricht, Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology). The paper is available at the site.

Reinhard, please send your message through the contact page on the Arimaa
site. Larry just sent me a message and I got it. Not sure why I didn't get
yours. You can also post it in the forum on the Arimaa site.
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/

Also please see the Arimaa Public License:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/license/

For personal, educational and research use, Arimaa is freely available.

Mr. Muller, I think there are several very talented programmers who are
very interested in wanting to build strong Arimaa programs and have devoted
a lot of time to building such programs. Please see David Fotland's paper
or Haizhi Zhong's thesis on building a strong Arimaa program. 

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/papers/

Of course you are also welcome to try.

Omar: thank you very much for your reaction here!

To 'Also please see the Arimaa Public License: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/license/ ': well, I am not a native English speaker, as a lot of chess and variants programmers would not be, too. Thus I do not understand every implication of the license's details. If those rules would be valid also e.g. for the country of Germany, where I am living in, it would be fine to have a German language translation at hands. This is, because I am not a lawyer, and I had experienced a lot of difficulties around an unspeakable 10x8 chess variant targeting a bunch of priorly very interested people.

To: 'For personal, educational and research use, Arimaa is freely available.': I occasionally used to publish my (still amateur level) combined 8x8 and 10x8 chess multi variant engine SMIRF and GUI at my homesite http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachsmirf_e.html, very rarely from time to time gathering by it some voluntary donations to support that programming work, which needs casually to be enhanced e.g. buying some updates of development tools. 

Within SMIRF I therefore had to disable that unspeakable 10x8 variant to prevent it from general use. Moreover nevertheless I always regarded myself to be only a small step away from jail. Such feelings are not of that kind, which might increase motivation and creativity to deepen an understanding especially of patented variants. It seems, that there would be no chance to legally publish any Arimaa® enabled program or GUI at a personal web site, so why should I start an Arimaa® development at all, when only earning of trouble seems to be certain already e.g. by giving away some program copies mainly for testing purposes?

I was thinking of trying out the Axiomatic Development Kit with one of my old Zillions implementation. Now, I've decided to apply it to this game.

Not saying that the engine add-on will improve the computer play enough to win the contest. But it will be a challenge to push the code to its limit.

Even after simply coding the rules into the application, I plan to run many computerVScomputer games to tweak its dynamics. For example: Are there any optimal set-up patterns which the computer might select from? Does having certain pieces on certain positions improve the play of the program? And, exactly what are the values of the pieces in this game and how would they be expressed?

This will be My Summer Project. Looking forward to the vid-strain and the coffee jitters. ;-)

Hi Larry. I didn't know about the Axiom Development Kit. I just read about
it. It will be interesting to see how much stronger Zillions can be with
this. I look forward to trying it out.

>Are there any optimal set-up patterns which the computer might select
from?

Someone had posted in the Arimaa forum about a study of the frequency of
times various setups were used. I am not able to find that posting
currently, but I'll send it to you once I find it. I think you could use
these results to get some predefined setups. The question of how optimal a
setup is would be hard to answer. Perhaps we don't have enough games yet
to even try to answer it.

>Does having certain pieces on certain positions improve the play of the
program?

I don't think anyone has studied this yet.

>And, exactly what are the values of the pieces in this game and how would
they be expressed?

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this on the Arimaa forum
(bot developer section). The current best model uses relative evaluation
based on what other pieces are on the board as opposed to absolute values
for the pieces. http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/

Thanks for the heads-up on the info, Omar.

Kinda thought the piece values would be based upon not only their rank(power hierarchy) but also upon their position in relation to the opposing pieces. For example, the Elephant would be a very powerful piece but the opposing Elephant could lower that value simply by being within its area of movement(and this effect could be mutual). Blocking an equal, or even lower, ranked piece could be considered an asset to its value. 

Particularly when it relates to Rabbits. Keeping the opposing Rabbits as far from their last rank could be considered a positive field position. So, not only the value of the Rabbit could be based upon its particular position on the field but the values of all the player's Rabbits could be used to calculate an effective field position.

And Freezing would also be a value. The piece which is 'frozen', and the pieces which is doing the 'freezing', could have their overall value(or simply a sub-value) modified by this condition. This could also be further modified by the positions of other pieces in relation to these.

I've already coded a ZRF so that the engine 'randomly' initiates a set-up pattern for both sides. This allows me to test out a large number of potential set-up patterns. Of course, the current code is rather dim, being able to only look-ahead a few full turns. But I can manually create possible positions on the field and see how they will play out(if I have a lot of patience).

A simple translation of this code into Axiom will be the first step of the project.