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Topic: Arimaa Wikibook featured (Read 5068 times) |
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omar
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Arimaa Wikibook featured
« on: Dec 26th, 2009, 11:08pm » |
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The server logs also showed an unusually high number of hits from the Arimaa wikibook. When I looked into it, I noticed that the Arimaa wikibook was selected as a featured wikibook.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Arimaa
Congratulations to the Arimaa community for the great job on creating the wikibook. I have to give a special thank to Karl and also Greg, because I know they put a lot of effort into it. There may be others who did also, but I am not aware of it, so once again thanks everyone for all your efforts.
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Adanac
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #1 on: Jan 6th, 2010, 1:27pm » |
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on Dec 26th, 2009, 11:08pm, omar wrote:The server logs also showed an unusually high number of hits from the Arimaa wikibook. When I looked into it, I noticed that the Arimaa wikibook was selected as a featured wikibook.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Arimaa
Congratulations to the Arimaa community for the great job on creating the wikibook. I have to give a special thank to Karl and also Greg, because I know they put a lot of effort into it. There may be others who did also, but I am not aware of it, so once again thanks everyone for all your efforts.
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I looked at Wikipedia today, and I was surprised to see that Arimaa now has articles in 17 different languages!
Czech, Danish, German, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Arabic, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, Turkish, Chinese, Tamil
Very impressive! By comparison Chess has articles in 102 different languages and Bobby Orr, the greatest ice hockey player ever, only has articles in 13 languages.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #2 on: Jan 6th, 2010, 1:51pm » |
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I have a bone to pick with the Chinese article on Arimaa for the way they transliterate the game name. There is a Chinese game superficially similar to Arimaa which we call Jungle Game and they call (literally) "fight-animal-chess". I believe that the creator of the Chinese article on Arimaa originally made a clever reference to Jungle chess by calling Arimaa "run-animal-chess". That highlighted the similarity while giving Arimaa its own identity.
Unfortunately, a later editor changed the translation of Arimaa to "Indian-fight-animal-chess". This is equivalent to the claim that Arimaa is (A) a variant of Jungle Game, which it isn't and (B) that Arimaa is an Indian game, which it isn't. It is simply a bad translation.
We need to recruit a Chinese speaker among us to rectify the poor decision and reinstate Arimaa as "run-animal-chess". Unfortunately they will have to be eloquent enough to resist the patriotic impulse of the Chinese to assume that our game is a spinoff of their game, since the Chinese invented everything first. 
reference: http://www.chessvariants.org/other.dir/animal.html
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Belteshazzar
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update?
« Reply #3 on: Jan 17th, 2011, 12:48pm » |
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While the Arimaa Wikibook is very good, it could stand to be updated to include strategies which have been discovered and refined in the last three years. There is still a red-linked chapter entitled "Other Attacking Ideas". Though I have worked on the wikibook a bit, my expertise on Arimaa is too limited to make any substantial revisions.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #4 on: Jan 17th, 2011, 1:42pm » |
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Yes, the Wikibook is way out of date. And more than modernization, it needs additional examples, particularly of goal attacks and endgames. However, I am resolved not to edit it any more, because I think there are many community members who could spruce it up. Please don't think of it as my project or Adanac's project any more. Don't feel that the current text is sacrosanct; you can clarify, refactor, or delete outright as well as adding.
Editing and expanding the Arimaa Wikibook is a great way to give back to the Arimaa community, and it's a great way to teach yourself. While trying to write about something, you learn how fuzzy your ideas are, and can sharpen your own understanding considerably.
My current contribution to the community is trying to maximize the number of games for which I give live commentary. Feel free to take anything I say in commentary and work it back into the Wikibooks! 
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| « Last Edit: Jan 17th, 2011, 2:34pm by Fritzlein » |
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mistre
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #5 on: Mar 14th, 2011, 9:31am » |
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Who has info on the last 3 Arimaa Challenges - 2008-2010? It was a very interesting read for 2004-2007 and it would be good to have a complete description of the events before too much time goes by and these games are forgotten. I would be willing to help out if needed.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #6 on: Mar 14th, 2011, 11:15am » |
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It would be nice to have the Challenge reports up to date, but I have already forgotten what happened. Just the other day I was seeing on Wikipedia that I beat Bomb with a camel handicap, and I had no recollection how I had done it or why I felt sufficiently confident to try. Boy howdy, that seems like another lifetime now that we can't beat sharp at even games. Anyone who wants to tell that story is probably going to have to look at the games themselves, hope the games have comments, look for historical threads in the Events section of the forum, and for the last year or two see if there was live chat saved in the archive. I think it is too late to create reports from memory; it must primarily be a distillation from hard records that already exist.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 14th, 2011, 11:20am by Fritzlein » |
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Belteshazzar
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #7 on: Apr 25th, 2011, 11:30pm » |
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I have been trying to update points of strategy, and I'd like confirmation on whether I'm being accurate. Is it in fact now the dominant opinion that, with the board full, a camel is worth less than a horse plus a cat? Here is the page in question: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Arimaa/Relative_Value_of_Pieces#Opening_Tra des
Also, I wasn't sure what to do with this:
Quote:| A relatively common material sacrifice in the opening is to sacrifice a rabbit in order to gain a horse held hostage by a camel. It is common in part because there is no consensus who has gained in the exchange, so players will still gladly take either side of the position. |
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I'm not sure that I've ever seen this done. Is there now a consensus one way or the other?
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| « Last Edit: Apr 25th, 2011, 11:38pm by Belteshazzar » |
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Adanac
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #8 on: Apr 26th, 2011, 6:24am » |
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on Apr 25th, 2011, 11:30pm, Belteshazzar wrote:
Thanks for taking the initiative to clean up the Wikibook!
I don't believe that statement reflects the dominant opinion. I think most players would either slightly prefer a camel over a horse + cat or consider them equal. It's only on a depleted board that having two weaker pieces is clearly better than having the extra camel.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #9 on: Apr 26th, 2011, 9:02am » |
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on Apr 25th, 2011, 11:30pm, Belteshazzar wrote:| I'm not sure that I've ever seen this done. Is there now a consensus one way or the other? |
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It's funny, but I don't see a rabbit sacrifice to gain camel-holding-horse-hostage as much as I used to. It happened in my 2010 postal mixer game against Hippo: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=150713&s=w but I don't recall seeing it in any of the World Championship games that I watched. I am not sure why; maybe it is because swarming is so common these days that anyone who has committed a horse just follows it with an avalanche of pieces rather than trying to break the horse free.
I don't know whether there is a consensus or not. I am curious what Adanac and chessandgo think about the value of a camel holding horse hostage.
Thanks for your efforts of clean up the Wikibook; it's good to have someone manning the fort.
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| « Last Edit: Apr 26th, 2011, 9:06am by Fritzlein » |
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Belteshazzar
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #10 on: Apr 27th, 2011, 4:41am » |
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on Apr 26th, 2011, 6:24am, Adanac wrote:| I don't believe that statement reflects the dominant opinion. I think most players would either slightly prefer a camel over a horse + cat or consider them equal. It's only on a depleted board that having two weaker pieces is clearly better than having the extra camel. |
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Thanks, I edited further to reflect this.
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chessandgo
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #11 on: Apr 27th, 2011, 9:05am » |
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I think most players value the M for HC opening trade as more or less equal, indeed. And it's hard to talk about the value of a horse hostage, it can range from a whole horse (if there is a second large material threat) to 0 (if the camel does not have an advanced friendly piece in support, or if this supporting piece is attacked by the enemy camel for example).
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Belteshazzar
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #12 on: Jun 5th, 2011, 3:39am » |
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A question about this section. Shouldn't "is indifferent to" be "wants to avoid" when talking about even trades? Since, for example, a cat-for-cat trade would diminish a dog advantage.
Quote:*A player who has won a Dog for nothing in the opening would like to trade Camels, Horses, and Dogs but is indifferent to trades of Cats and Rabbits.
*A player who has won a Camel for nothing in the opening is indifferent to all trades, and will instead normally try to win further material outright. |
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| « Last Edit: Jun 5th, 2011, 3:53am by Belteshazzar » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #13 on: Jun 5th, 2011, 12:03pm » |
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I stand by what I wrote, but I don't feel strongly about it. I notice that FAME and HarLog disagree: FAME slightly likes the equal trade when ahead and HarLog slightly dislikes it.
From a theoretical standpoint, you can make the case that a full board tends to cloud the advantage of having an extra piece. What's the difference between fifteen and sixteen? Taking pieces off the board makes it more obvious who has one more, because the side with fewer pieces doesn't have enough to do all the jobs that need to be done. In chess, the conventional wisdom is that when you are ahead by a piece, you should trade pieces (but not pawns) to make the extra piece count for more, and I can see the logic applying to Arimaa as well.
On the other hand, Arimaa is more under control when the board is full, and increasingly unstable as the board empties out. I can imagine that a player who is behind would be delighted to make any even exchange, because it sharpens the tactics and makes blunders more common, which creates chances for the trailing side. So I can see the case for not wanting even trades when ahead.
I expect my endgame experience is too shallow to make a good judgment on this score. I have focused most of my thoughts and energy on the middlegame, so my intuitions as to what happens when the board thins out are weak. I wonder what other people think about the kind of even trades Belteshazzar is referring to.
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| « Last Edit: Jun 5th, 2011, 6:36pm by Fritzlein » |
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Hippo
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Re: Arimaa Wikibook featured
« Reply #14 on: Jun 5th, 2011, 3:56pm » |
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I don't agree with evaluation of trades when holding camel hostage. It's true that piece exchanges makes value of the camel smaller, but defending player has much more difficult task to rotate his phant from defense.
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