Arimaa/Overview
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
Arimaa is a two-player board game invented by Omar Syed, a computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. Syed was inspired by Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the chess computer Deep Blue to design a new game which would be difficult for computers to play well, but would have rules simple enough for his four-year-old son Aamir to understand. ("Arimaa" is "Aamir" spelled backwards plus an initial "a"). In 2002 Syed published the rules to Arimaa and announced a $10,000 prize, available yearly through 2020, for the first computer program able to defeat a top-ranked human player in a match six games or longer. The prize has not yet been won.
As of late 2007, Arimaa has proven so computer-resistant that top human players can no longer find much interest in games against Arimaa programs, even the top programs created by professional developers. This Wikibook therefore treats computer Arimaa only tangentially. The primary purpose of these pages is to give advice to humans on how to play well against other humans. (Some strategies for use specifically against computers can be found at the arimaa.com Wiki.)
Arimaa can be played in person with a chess set, or on-line at the arimaa.com gameroom. As of late 2007, no Arimaa-specific game pieces have been commercially produced, and only one face-to-face tournament has taken place (photos), but about 500 games per week are played on-line. Omar Syed hosts four events per year in the gameroom:
- The World Championship is an open tournament for human players from January to March. The current format is one round per week of an open Swiss qualifier followed by floating double-elimination among the top eight qualifiers. All four World Champions so far have been players who learned the game less than a year prior to the championship tournament, and who usurped more experienced players to win the title. This is a testament to how fast the knowledge of how to play well is expanding.
- The Computer Championship takes place in March, to determine which program earns the right to play in the Arimaa Challenge. The format is floating triple elimination, and participation is limited to the top eight programs. All four tournaments so far have been won by the program Bomb, by David Fotland.
- The Arimaa Challenge takes place in April. The top computer program attempts to win the $10,000 prize against human defenders. So far humans have dominated every challenge match.
- A Postal Mash begins in April and ends around October. The emphasis of this tournament is participation, rather than determining a champion. The objective is to advance the frontiers of strategic knowledge, as well as to spread around existing knowledge by pairing people to a variety of opponents.
United States Patent number 6,981,700 for Arimaa was filed on the 3rd of October 2003, and granted on the 3rd of January 2006. Omar Syed also holds a trademark on the name "Arimaa". Syed has released an experimental license called "The Arimaa Public License", with the declared intent to "make Arimaa as much of a public domain game as possible while still protecting its commercial usage". Items covered by the license are the patent and the trademark.
