Arimaa

Arimaa

An Arimaa elephant
Designer(s)	Omar Syed and Aamir Syed
Publisher(s)	Z-Man Games
Years active	2002 – present
Genre(s)	Board game Abstract strategy game
Players	2
Setup time	< 1 minute
Playing time	15 minutes – 2 hours
Random chance	None
Skill(s) required	Strategy, tactics
Website	http://www.arimaa.com

Arimaa ⁱ/əˈriːmə/ (ə-REE-mə) is a two-player strategy board game that was designed to be playable with a standard chess set and difficult for computers while still being easy to learn and fun to play for humans. Every year since 2004, the Arimaa community has held three tournaments: a World Championship (humans only), a Computer Championship (computers only), and the Arimaa Challenge (human vs. computer). In 2015, the challenge was won decisively by the computer (Sharp by David Wu), with top players agreeing that computers had become better at the game than humans. As it was a prerequisite for the prize to be awarded, Wu published a paper describing the algorithm and most of ICGA Journal Issue 38/1 was dedicated to this topic.

Arimaa was invented in 2003 by Omar Syed, an Indian-American computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. Syed was inspired by Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the chess computer Deep Blue to design a new game which could be played with a standard chess set, would be difficult for computers to play well, but would have rules simple enough for his then four-year-old son Aamir to understand. ("Arimaa" is "Aamir" spelled backwards plus an initial "a".)