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        Arimaa >> Arimaa Buzz >> XKCD!!!
        
(Message started by: rabbits on Jan 11th, 2012, 12:04am)
Title: XKCD!!!
Post by rabbits on Jan 11th, 2012, 12:04am
Today's XKCD mentions Arimaa! :D

http://xkcd.com/1002/

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/game_ais.png
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2012, 12:44am
Cool. Thanks for sharing.
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by Dolus on Jan 11th, 2012, 10:40am
Blast! You beat me to the punch, Rabbits.

We're almost put on par with Go, but are way further down than Poker (relatively). :)
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by FireBorn on Jan 11th, 2012, 12:29pm
Hehe, I came here to post about this, too
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by Adanac on Jan 11th, 2012, 4:29pm

on 01/11/12 at 12:29:25, FireBorn wrote:
Hehe, I came here to post about this, too


My brother sent me a link this morning but Rabbits beat me to it as well :)

This website is obviously huge.  Go to the Gameroom and under the "New Players" page, check out how many people came here because of that joke  :o
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by Dolus on Jan 11th, 2012, 5:52pm
No kidding. At least 120 people in the last 24 hours have signed up from the looks of it. I looked very briefly, so I could be wrong, but there's a lot of signups.
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by thomastanck on Jan 12th, 2012, 3:54am

on 01/11/12 at 16:29:09, Adanac wrote:
My brother sent me a link this morning but Rabbits beat me to it as well :)

This website is obviously huge.  Go to the Gameroom and under the "New Players" page, check out how many people came here because of that joke  :o


Hm I think Arimaa's harder than Go, though...
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by Hippo on Jan 12th, 2012, 6:08am

on 01/12/12 at 03:54:23, thomastanck wrote:
Hm I think Arimaa's harder than Go, though...


I would not say that, but I could say for sure that Go is played on bigger board ;).

I love simplicity of Go rules (not considering ko and komi) allowing it to be played on arbitrary graph. Arimaa is nice game with almost same simplicity of rules.
I prefere Arimaa to chess not only due to Rybka, but rather for the game rules simplicity.

Chess rules are complicated there is no particular reason for given piece to have that movement options.
I can imagine chess-like games with much different piece trajectories ... historical "Bishop ... kNight moving 2 steps diagonally", chinesse chess ... all such games would be considered to be another game. On the contrary generalization of Arimaa to other board graphs would be easy.

I am not sure how would we consider it after the challenge would be over. I hope we will consider it nice even when top bots would beat us.
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by leo on Jan 12th, 2012, 9:29am
Was coming to tell the news too. ;D
There's a forum on xkcd and it might be a good place to discuss the relative position of Arimaa on the scale.
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by Fritzlein on Jan 12th, 2012, 10:57am

on 01/12/12 at 10:36:40, omar wrote:
Aamir really flipped out when he saw that, cause he follows xkcd :-)

Wow, on Jan 12 2012 there were 160 accounts created and 576 games played. That's definitely a record.

What's amazing is that it's just a mention in the image and not even a direct link to the Arimaa site, so people have to google what Arimaa is, read about it and then come to the site, find their way to the gameroom and register. xkcd must have a huge following.

I was alerted by my sister; I had no idea she read xkcd every day!

The number of games played in one day is a record, but the number of new accounts created is not.  Way back in the summer of 2005 we got mentioned on Metafilter, which got us 254 new accounts in a single day, but fewer than 200 games played.

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=talk;action=display;num=1124748166

I agree that the number of folks coming to take a look is remarkable given the lack of a direct link.  That probably also explains why we got over three games played per new account from xkcd as opposed to less than one game played per new account from Metafilter; the xkcd folks who did show up were more motivated on average than the Metafilter folks who only had to click a link.

But also I can attest to the Arimaa site being more welcoming to newcomers than it was in 2005.  Admittedly, we might be able to attain even better retention of newcomers with a better first impression, but it is easier to get oriented and start on the bot ladder than it once was.
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by omar on Jan 12th, 2012, 11:19am

on 01/12/12 at 09:29:13, leo wrote:
Was coming to tell the news too. ;D
There's a forum on xkcd and it might be a good place to discuss the relative position of Arimaa on the scale.


That's a good idea. If anyone here already has an account there, maybe they can start the discussion. I'll join in if needed.
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by rabbits on Jan 12th, 2012, 12:08pm

on 01/11/12 at 16:29:09, Adanac wrote:
My brother sent me a link this morning but Rabbits beat me to it as well :)


My roommate posted the link on my Facebook wall almost immediately.  And my brother told me about it too :)
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by 99of9 on Feb 1st, 2012, 6:20pm
I just found out that xkcd caused a real buzz about arimaa on G+

https://plus.google.com/s/arimaa
Title: Re: XKCD!!!
Post by omar on Feb 3rd, 2012, 11:42pm

on 02/01/12 at 18:20:58, 99of9 wrote:
I just found out that xkcd caused a real buzz about arimaa on G+

https://plus.google.com/s/arimaa


Wow, I didn't know there was that much discussion of Arimaa on G+. Thanks for the link.


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