> http://arimaa.com/arimaa/ > > He thinks his game is 100x more complex than go.... Begging the question of what the meaning of complexity is, of course. I don't doubt that the total number of possible Arimaa games, or some similar metric, is several orders of magnitude greater than for chess. But it is highly misleading to equate such a metric with complexity. A counter-example of a game with a huge branching factor but obviously low complexity level would be trivial to construct. And of course what is "complex" for human beings may not be "complex" for computers, and vice versa. My unsubstantiated hunch is that this game might actually be substantially easier to program a computer to win at than chess is. The $10,000 prize should take more like three years to win than eighteen, if anybody bothers, that is. My sense is that fellow that invented this game, with all due respect, actually has virtually no understanding of what makes a game hard to solve. He doesn't seem to even understand the way chess programs work, apparently believing that they enumerate all positions. If all he has really done is added three orders of magnitude to the size of the game tree, then we can easily ask what the strength is of a chess program which does 1/1000 of the computation done by the current strongest programs. Certainly it is not only capable of beating an "average human" but in fact very strong humans. Having freedom to place your pieces at the beginning of the game as Arimaa allows certainly changes the nature of the opening book, but hardly makes it irrelevant. Certain categories of starting positions will be identified as most favorable, and standard openings will grow up around them. And of course Go already has this characteristic -- with the freedom to place your pieces anywhere you like starting at the first move, which doesn't seem to have prevented the development of thousands of joseki. His claim that Arimaa is more positional and less tactical than chess seem impossible to verify, but as another poster pointed out, it seems unlikely given the 8x8 size of the board, the different types of pieces, etc. It is hard to imagine a game more positional than Go with its large board size and homogenous playing pieces. -- Bob Myers