It looks like AI is overtaking Arimaa, which is notable because Arimaa was created specifically as a challenge to AI. Congratulations to the programmer, David Wu.
On the subject of Arimaa, I’ve noted a general feeling of “This game is hard for computers to play—and that makes it a much better game!”
Progress of AI research aside, why should I care if I choose a game in which the top computer beats the top human, or one in which the top human beats the top computer? (Presumably both the top human and the top computer can beat me, in either case.)
Is it that in go, you can aspire (unrealistically, perhaps) to be the top player in the world, while in chess, the highest you can ever go is a top human that will still be defeated by computers?
Or is it that chess, which computers are good at, feels like a solved problem, while go still feels mysterious and exciting? Not that we’ve solved either game in the sense of having solved tic-tac-toe or checkers. And I don’t think we should care too much about having solved checkers either, for the purposes of actually playing the game.
I hadn’t heard of Armaa before, but based on about 5 minutes worth of reading about the game, I don’t understand how it is significantly more suited to natural reasoning that chess. It inherits many of chess’s general features that make serial planning more effective than value function knowledge—thus favoring fast thinkers over slow deep thinkers. Go is much more of a natural reasoning game.
It looks like AI is overtaking Arimaa, which is notable because Arimaa was created specifically as a challenge to AI. Congratulations to the programmer, David Wu.
On the subject of Arimaa, I’ve noted a general feeling of “This game is hard for computers to play—and that makes it a much better game!”
Progress of AI research aside, why should I care if I choose a game in which the top computer beats the top human, or one in which the top human beats the top computer? (Presumably both the top human and the top computer can beat me, in either case.)
Is it that in go, you can aspire (unrealistically, perhaps) to be the top player in the world, while in chess, the highest you can ever go is a top human that will still be defeated by computers?
Or is it that chess, which computers are good at, feels like a solved problem, while go still feels mysterious and exciting? Not that we’ve solved either game in the sense of having solved tic-tac-toe or checkers. And I don’t think we should care too much about having solved checkers either, for the purposes of actually playing the game.
I hadn’t heard of Armaa before, but based on about 5 minutes worth of reading about the game, I don’t understand how it is significantly more suited to natural reasoning that chess. It inherits many of chess’s general features that make serial planning more effective than value function knowledge—thus favoring fast thinkers over slow deep thinkers. Go is much more of a natural reasoning game.
From the sound of it, the AI works more or less like chess AI—search with a hand-tuned evaluation function.