The Arimaa Challenge was won on April 18, 2015 and is
no longer available. This page exists for historical purpose.
Currently the best Arimaa players are humans. But
how long will it stay that way. Each year advances
in computer hardware are shortening the gap between
the computational power of the brain and that
of computers. However we are
confident that Arimaa will continue to be the
domain of humans for years to come.
When will computers defeat the best human Arimaa players
In fact we are offering a prize of at least $10,000 USD (current prize may be more) until 2020 to the first
person, company or organization who develops
a program that can defeat three selected human players in an
official Arimaa match.
The match will consist of at least 3 games against each of the
three players.
The program must be able to run on a general-purpose, off-the-shelf
computer and not require any specialized hardware.
We invite participants
from Universities, Corporations and also individuals
around the world to see if they can develop the best
Arimaa playing program.
Each January a tournament will be held to
determine the best Arimaa playing program. The
winner of that tournament will receive a prize
and a chance to try for the $10,000 grand challenge
of defeating human players. We especially would like to
encourage teams from Universities around the world
to participate. The contest will be fun and interesting.
Arimaa demonstrates that when it comes to serious game
playing, humans still dominate. By offering this challenge we hope to
increase the awareness that the
difficult problem of teaching computers to play strategy
games has not yet been tackled. There is much work that needs to be done
in understanding how humans play strategy games and
producing similar capability in software.
We hope this challenge will spur
some new and radically different ways of replicating
this astonishing human capability in software.
The breakthroughs that will come from such research
can have significant applications in a wide variety
of fields.