A new board game called Arimaa
www.arimaa.com is
designed to use the same board and pieces provided in a
standard chess set, but be difficult for computers to
play. The game was invented by Omar Syed, a former
NASA computer engineer with a Masters in Artificial
Intelligence, and his son, Aamir.
Ever since chess champion Garry Kasparov lost to
IBMís Deep Blue in 1997, humans have not been able
to regain a victory against computers in an official Man
vs. Machine match. Humans reclaimed their dominance
over the chess board when the Arimaa-playing program
was defeated 8-0 by Syed. The eight game series was
overseen by the International Computer Games
Association (ICGA --
www.icga.org). “Board game
matches between man and computer are a valuable test
bed for artificial intelligence,” according to Jeroen
Donkers of the ICGA.
“This victory shows that even though computers can
now perform billions of calculations per second, they
are still very far behind when it comes to making
long-
term
strategic decisions — especially when there are a
lot of creative options to choose from,” said Syed. “We |
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have a long way to go in understanding this astonishing
human capability and replicating it in software.”
Although more than 20 AI enthusiasts are working on
developing such a program, so far only a few have produced
programs that play well enough to challenge a
human. One of these programs was developed by David
Fotland of Smart Games
(www.smart-games.com).
Fotland is a veteran game programmer who has also
developed a world-champion Go program.
”Initially I
thought I would be able to win the challenge, not
because Arimaa was easy, but because it was a new
game, and the people playing it were not strong yet,”
said Fotland. “For a while, my program was as strong as
or stronger than any person, but the human players
improved rapidly and developed some new strategic
concepts that were very difficult to capture in a computer
program.”
“Visitors to the
www.arimaa.com
site can replay the
match games. There is also a Flash tutorial which shows
how to play the game as well as a game room where
visitors can play against programs and other players
from around the world.
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