Arimaa Part 1

Chess in the movies is always played sharp, and this has particular meaning among elite competitors as the bold and tactical moves of an aggressive player. Sharp is also the name of a very successful chessbot, yet the game that it plays is not quite chess, but a variant called Arimaa.

On the same weekend last month that Ex Machina was ramping into theaters, Sharp won a contest known as the Arimaa Challenge, pitting it against three selected human minds. This award has gone uncollected in twelve years of annual competition. No one until April 2015 had been able to design an AI that could outwit the humans.

To understand the origin of Arimaa, one must recount the defeat of Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue in 1997. At that moment, the mantle of the world’s greatest chess player went from a person to a computer. The event was an international sensation, sparking debates and headlining the news everywhere.

In response to that humbling defeat, a computer engineer named Omar Syed was inspired to create a new game. It used the same board and pieces as chess, but its design was informed by his understanding of how an AI actually calculates moves, with a brute force search of all solutions. To counter this algorithmic approach, Syed made a game whose rules would intentionally be difficult for a computer to play, yet was no harder than chess for an average person.

The rules were rigged in our favor by giving many more possible choices on each turn, making it more intuitive and less linear. If chess presents roughly 30 moves on a turn, then by contrast Arimaa offers 17,000. The ingenuity behind this game was the opportunity to turn back the clock to a time before Deep Blue, before humans had been so humbled.

In fact, the Twitter description for Arimaa states that it is "designed to show that humans are still ahead of computers." Well, just like in Ex Machina, those days might be numbered for us bi-peds, but it remains a fascinating game. Feel free to check out further details on Arimaa.com