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Arimaa. Board game playable with standard chess set, hard for computers. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

George Duke wrote on Tue, Feb 4, 2014 06:09 PM UTC:Poor ★

Poor insofar as it is a CV.  Well-promoted with award announced for successful AI program, Arimaa has no displacement capture as such, and everything is along orthogonals, no diagonals.  It's a shame Arimaa is habitually being mentioned in the same breath as great oriental classic Go as hard for computers. (Games Magazine and the rest must be influenced by the "Beasts" for the piece-types) Arimaa has unaesthetcially too many win conditions available; it would be more tolerable on larger boards, for example the way Maxima has three possible win conditions.  There are far better race games those brilliant by Parton and Betza -- isolating the happenstantial Arimaa win route to get Rabbit to rank 8. Further, non-intuitive Arimaa (invented just before 2004)  won't improve natural Chessic thinking for design or for play.


Think of the whole business as a sort of pico-Rithmomachia phase http://www.chessvariants.org/misc.dir/rithmomachia.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rithmomachy. And well-conceived historic Rithmomachy actually has many a worthwhile variation to speculate and test, unlike the above listless distraction of gargantuan game tree.