$10,000 Arimaa Prize Still Up For Grabs

A $10,000 prize was announced in November 2002 for any developer of a program that could defeat a selected human player in an official Arimaa match before the year 2020. It was a challenge to the AI community in an effort to promote research and further develop the intelligence of computers.

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. The best of these 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.”

A former NASA computer engineer with a Masters in Artificial Intelligence, Syed and his son Aamir designed the new game after seeing Garry Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue in 1997.

“We wanted to show that humans are still capable of out-playing a computer using just a standard chess set. I consider myself an average strategic game player. So this victory means even more to humanity,” commented Syed. “I think many people will be pleased to find a game where they can actually beat the computer after a little practice. There aren’t many games left now where you can do that.”

The $10,000 challenge still stands; developers will have another chance to try for the prize next year. “I would like to see someone else take on the computer next year,” said Syed. “I’m sure there are many people out there who can play this game much better than I can.”

Visitors to the arimaa site can replay the match games. There is also a Flash tutorial which shows how to play the game as well as a gameroom where visitors can play against programs and other players from around the world.

Contact Information
Sameer Siddiqui
216-926-6448