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

Arimaa Part 2

Chess is an age-old game, so it arrives as a digital immigrant into our modern era, but Arimaa is something new, an arena built precisely to give every seeming advantage back to 'the people'. Games are hosted on a dedicated server for Arimaa competition which is accessed by both humans and their bots. Omar Syed maintains the server and continues to manage events relating to his creation, including a cash prize of over $10,000 to the maker of the first Challenge-winning AI.

Different programs with names like Jumbo and Clueless competed to win the 2015 computer championship. When the one called Sharp prevailed, it then faced a panel of three strong human players who were winners of a separate contest. Not since the founding of the annual tournament in 2004 had the humans ever lost the final challenge. Yet on April 18th, it was Sharp that won 7-2.

At least it ranks as a singular human achievement. Sharp was not built by a secret team of corporate engineers with vast resources a la IBM's Deep Blue, but instead was the result of a multi-year effort by the programmer David Wu, a Harvard graduate whose senior thesis was titled “Move Ranking and Evaluation in the Game of Arimaa.”

However, on a public forum, Wu had engaged in a side bet with one of Sharp’s human challengers. To most, the relatively small bet looked like a way to juice up their friendly rivalry. That is still how people view it, but when Syed was made aware of the bet, he invalidated the tournament results on the grounds that it was “influenced in ways that were not intended.”

Although the breakthrough victory by an AI appeared to have happened, it might otherwise have been saddled with a question mark or an asterisk, so Sharp will have to wait for its accolades. On account of this technicality, humans remain undefeated. The Arimaa Challenge will continue next year in its thirteenth annual installment. The question is, to humans, will we up our game in 2016, or is defeat now inevitable?