Arimaa Forum
        (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi)
      

        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
        
(Message started by: megajester on May 31st, 2010, 11:13am)
Title: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on May 31st, 2010, 11:13am
I hope nobody has done this already, but I wanted to try and express the depth I know we've all discovered in Arimaa. Right from the beginning we've seen chess players as our main potential player base. If we can express how great Arimaa is, not just in technical terms, but in philosophical, even poetic terms, perhaps this will help to show the world that Arimaa is an intellectual journey, much more than just another abstract strategy game.

I'll start by talking about other games. I've recently discovered go, and even though I'm a complete beginner, I'm completely awed by it's history and tradition. In contrast I've played chess all my life, but in Western culture it's simply a sideshow when compared with the reverence accorded go in China and Japan. It's regarded as a philosophy, a font of wisdom. Even it's strategic guidelines, which we would more likely call "tips and tricks" or "rules of thumb", are called proverbs.

I found this page (http://www.kiseido.com/yyy.htm) featuring many "quotable quotes" about go. One of the most amusing and contoversial is probably the following:

Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.
(From Shibumi, bestseller by Trevanian)

I'm sure this will provoke howls of protest from the chess players among us, but I can see what he means. Success in chess depends on being very disciplined in calculating all possible permutations of the position. It's like taking turns to solve mathematical equations. Games are frequently more about lapses of concentration and technical oversights than a true clash of strategies.

This is precisely what led me on a search for a new game, a search that brought me to Arimaa.

Arimaa is one of those games where, once you've calculated the immediate threats and considerations, all your attention is focused on strategy. And that strategy is an epic struggle requiring balance, judgement, and level-headedness.

The four quadrants of the board are the scene of recurrent crises. However you can't give all your attention to the crisis around one trap, otherwise you can lose control over a different trap somewhere else, or even leave yourself open to that goal threat you forgot about 5 moves ago. You can "win the battle and lose the war."

Rather like life, you can't give all your attention to one thing, otherwise other things will slip. It's important to make a success of your career, but if you put your elephant and camel into getting that promotion you always wanted you'll start to become distant from family and friends, and even when you do get what you wanted it could be too late, the damage might be done. So you always have to remember what's really important in life...

That's perhaps not the best example, but hopefully it'll be enough to get everybody's juices going...
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 1st, 2010, 4:34am
It's very true that Go is held in high reverence in Asian cultures.  It makes me think well of a culture to know that it can honor its abstract strategy games.  Furthermore, it is pleasing to imagine a similar future for Arimaa centuries from now.

I must confess, however, that I find most of the parallels that are drawn between Go and real life to be pretty silly, while the Go-is-to-chess analogy strikes me as crudely parochial.  I don't understand why partisans of particular games need to put other games down.  (There are, of course, reverse putdowns chess players have for Go.  I read on Board Game Geek that Go players can't speak intelligibly about their game, and rave about "spring water dragon tactics" instead.)

This is not to say that building up some kind of mystical narrative around Arimaa wouldn't help popularize it.  One man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life.  I would caution, though, that if we intend to convert chess players, we should not try to puff up Arimaa by putting down chess.  That might be appealing to people who, for whatever reason, never took a shine to chess, and who would therefore like an opportunity to feel superior to all of those darned chess snobs.  An outsider appeal is definitely one marketing strategy that Arimaa could take, but I think it would be a mistake.

A slick presentation for Arimaa will help persuade people to give it a try.  Different presentations will get different people in the door.  But not everyone who tries Arimaa will actually like it, never mind love it.  Our statistics from arimaa.com show that, of the people who play at least one game, close to 4% go on to play one hundred games.  That's an incredible addiction rate, but it relies somewhat on getting good references rather than a stream of newcomers who have no interest in a serious abstract strategy game.

My theory is that the people you want to entice to the table are the ones who have the highest chance of eventually loving Arimaa.  If I had some marketing shtick that would persuade either one thousand poker players or one hundred chess players to give Arimaa a try, I would go for the hundred chess players as the better long-term investment.   I expect chess players to see something beautiful in Arimaa while the poker players would get bored because there is no money on the line, no bluffing with hidden information, no reading the opponents, and no coping with the vagaries of chance.

So I guess I'm saying that if we want to write essays about how east/west balance of forces in Arimaa taught us all to balance work and family in our lives, I will roll my eyes a little, but not strenuously object.  On the other hand, if it extends to saying, "...and chess never taught me any such thing," I'll do my best to interfere with the proceedings in defense of chess, one of the great abstract strategy games of all time.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Jun 1st, 2010, 7:20am

on 06/01/10 at 04:34:17, Fritzlein wrote:
One man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life.

Very true. I was expecting that some people would find my post just a bunch of guff. :)

I hadn't mean't to put chess down, though I completely understand why you'd think that. Perhaps using that quote wasn't the best idea, all I had wanted to say was that there are differences between chess and Arimaa and I like those differences. I also hadn't meant to say that Arimaa helps me to balance work and family, that would be silly. I was just trying to find some sort of analogy.

I suppose I'm trying to express why I love getting into "the zone" with Arimaa and why I feel it's unique. More guff, I know, but I think we all get some kind of rush when we play, some reason why we find Arimaa so intellectually satisfying. I wonder how you would describe it?
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 1st, 2010, 7:50am

on 06/01/10 at 07:20:24, megajester wrote:
I suppose I'm trying to express why I love getting into "the zone" with Arimaa and why I feel it's unique. More guff, I know, but I think we all get some kind of rush when we play, some reason why we find Arimaa so intellectually satisfying. I wonder how you would describe it?

I'm not really sure that I know what makes me tick.  I do get a rush from Arimaa, but why?  One of the reasons is the infinite learning curve.  I feel that I am learning something every time I play.  I never feel like I am stalled out and just can't learn any more.  Furthermore, the stuff I am learning seems to be interesting, i.e. not just memorizing a list of boring details, but formulating some kind of grand conception of what Arimaa is all about that will help across all my future games of Arimaa.

I'm fairly convinced that this isn't something Arimaa has and chess lacks.  It's quite relevant, then, to ask why I have spent so much more time on Arimaa than on chess, if they are both great games, and are great for essentially the same reasons.  I'm afraid the true answer is very prosaic: I am better at Arimaa than at chess.  The same sort of learning curve is intrinsically present for both games, but my experience of them was different.  It was easier for me to internalize truths about Arimaa strategy than about chess strategy.

I know it makes me sound spoiled and lazy to just want to play the games that I am best at, while giving up on the games that I struggle with.  It's my closest guess to the truth, though.  It sounds much more plausible to me than an explanation based on Arimaa being inherently more fun and more easy to learn than chess.  I suspect different people have an easier time learning different games for a whole slew of personal and environmental reasons unrelated to the intrinsic merit of the game.

Also, I think I have become allergic to people touting the relative greatness of the game they happen to like for purely subjective reasons.  I know that some people consider it relatively sterile and uninspiring to talk about depth, lack of draws, balance between the players, etc., but at least such things aren't just my own experience.  On the other hand, if I say that Arimaa gives me a buzz that chess never did, and some chess player says chess gives him a buzz while Arimaa leaves him flat, we are at an impasse about which essentially nothing more can be said.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Jun 1st, 2010, 1:30pm

on 06/01/10 at 07:50:22, Fritzlein wrote:
Also, I think I have become allergic to people touting the relative greatness of the game they happen to like for purely subjective reasons.  I know that some people consider it relatively sterile and uninspiring to talk about depth, lack of draws, balance between the players, etc., but at least such things aren't just my own experience.

Perhaps you misunderstood my purpose when I mentioned in the beginning that our main target player base is chess players. All I meant was, as a chess player I've enjoyed Arimaa's philosophical side so maybe other chess players will too.

When I started this thread, I had envisaged a discussion of how people experience Arimaa, what it feels like to play, how you organize your thoughts when planning the next move, perhaps some analogies, etc etc. Not a debate over whether we should be having this thread at all. If you're "allergic" to that kind of a discussion then that's OK, each to his own.

I wonder what everybody else thinks.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by CodexArcanum on Jun 1st, 2010, 1:45pm
I think people tend to find philosophy in everything, but that doesn't invalidate when a person feels like the metaphorical (and perhaps spiritual) connection between their lives and the philosophical subject.

I myself felt an interesting philosophical parallel to a recent arimaa game with my dad.  We had both ended up attacking opposite flanks (a high aggression game!) but with our elephants in the thick of each other's attacks.  It very much resembled a (somewhat square) taijitu (a yin and yang symbol).  I was contemplative after about how the game itself is a balance of opposing powers, and how the elephants were small points of unbreakable strength in the midst of opposition.  

More than just a basic mechanic of the game, the game as a whole is itself a push and pull.  Territory is given, territory is taken, but rarely is the overall strength of forces changed.  When it is (a capture) that can be a turning point of the game.  


I think you'd have to be very lacking in poetic sense to miss that symbolism.  How forces in life and nature always struggle, but are in balance.  Until some disruption (the traps in life) up-ends the balance and put things spiraling towards a conclusion, unless a balance can be reasserted.  

That works heavily in my strategic thoughts.  I divide the board into halves and quarters, contemplating where the strength lies, where the balance is shifting to, and how I can apply the right counter pressure to tilt in my favor.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by FireBorn on Jun 1st, 2010, 1:47pm
I feel like arimaa is some sort of in-between of chess and go in a sense. It is a game of "balance" like go, but it looks and feels more like chess due to the pieces and the way they move around the board. I suppose this is why I like it. Go is too abstract for me, and chess is too rigid. Arimaa is a nice in-between.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by SpeedRazor on Jun 1st, 2010, 1:59pm
As an Chess Player first and foremost, I probably should not chime in, but I feel that maybe I'm looking at two people crossing and diverging and crossing the same paths... [...]

I'm not a writer, and was once considered Autistic (whatever that means; and other crap too); Maybe Megajester is just asking for a dialogue about the Aesthetics of Arimaa?  (Form dictates Function should have produced a random gaming mutant monster with Arimaa.  It didn't, it seems  :))

...ere, sorry for butting in where I don't (yet) feel I belong.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by ocmiente on Jun 1st, 2010, 2:39pm
Fireborn's comments about Arimaa being in between Go and chess rang true for me.  Arimaa has more clarity than Go to me, and I like it more than Go. <EDIT>Go can also take a long time to play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_game). After thinking about it for a while, I think that's really the reason I haven't invested a lot of time in playing Go.

And Fritz' observation that he enjoys the game partially because he is good at it also sounded right.  The fact that it is still possible for a human to beat the best computer program at Arimaa makes me like it more than Chess in that respect.  

When I think about Arimaa, I see it as an act of improvisation.   As with any good music, there are points at which you can just tell what the next move (or chord) is going to be, and other times when a whole range of options are open to the player.  The move that is selected can lead to development that will make others who watch nod and say "yes, yes!" - or lead to uninspired ramblings - or even tragic consequences.  Improvisation may or may not be a type of philosophy - but I quickly searched for that and found a book titled "The Philosophy of Improvisation", so I'm sticking to that.  


On a different, but related note, I remember hearing, when I was younger, about chess being like a battle between two armies.  I guess that makes sense to some people, but I never did make that connection because I never saw the blood on the board :)  I would guess that the same is true of any philosphical attributes people want to apply to the game.  Some will see them clearly, others will see differently.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by leo on Jun 1st, 2010, 3:19pm
What I like in Arimaa is I can relate everything in it with something in the real world. Moving, pushing, pulling, freezing, trapping, are very straightforward to understand. The friendly piece preventing freezing or trapping is a bit more abstract though.

I can't relate as strongly to games where pieces seem to exist in an abstract space where computers are more at ease, being unconcerned with the real world. Actually a vacuum cleaner robot that manages to not get stuck in the furniture seems to me a greater achievement than Deep Blue ;)

When I see a pawn rushing to the goal, I really see a rabbit hopping to the goal with its little heart pounding, I don't see a shortening of some graph path. OK, that might not be some life-encompassing philosophy but it works for me. ;D
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by FireBorn on Jun 1st, 2010, 5:13pm
I imagine pieces "holding" friendly pieces over traps so that they don't fall in.

For unfreezing, I imagine them playing a game of freeze tag. Although I suppose you can unfreeze a friendly by "shaking" it free from the grasp of the enemy too.

I also like the improvisation aspect. When I first started playing there were points where I thought I'd learned all there was to learn about Arimaa, but there were always surprise lessons along the bot ladder. Learning about the existence of the elephant blockade is one of the things that really got me into Arimaa. If Fritz's comment is true, I am in for even more revelations as I continue to play.

As for philosophy...ahh...maybe next time
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 1st, 2010, 10:11pm

on 06/01/10 at 13:30:47, megajester wrote:
When I started this thread, I had envisaged a discussion of how people experience Arimaa, what it feels like to play, how you organize your thoughts when planning the next move, perhaps some analogies, etc etc. Not a debate over whether we should be having this thread at all. If you're "allergic" to that kind of a discussion then that's OK, each to his own.

I have no objection to discussing the subjective experience of Arimaa.  I took your opening post, however, as an invitation to develop a subjective narrative about why Arimaa is better than chess, along the lines of the narrative some people have as to why Go is better than chess.  I think it is legitimate for me to give the reasons why I think developing such a narrative would be a net negative for the Arimaa community.

Now you have clarified that your proposal was merely to talk about what Arimaa feels like, including how it feels different from other games.  I'm cool with that, and wouldn't want to interfere.  Heck, I've done it myself, saying that Arimaa is to chess as wrestling is to boxing.  I apologize for the extent to which my post came across as saying, "Because I don't care to discuss mushy subjective stuff, no one should."

From my first post in this thread, I had two separate reactions that I apparently didn't keep separate well enough: a reaction to talking about games philosophically per se, and a reaction to using nebulous criteria to put down one's non-favorite games.  I'm sorry for the extent to which I let those bleed into each other.

I'm glad for the direction the thread has taken since then.  <bows out>
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Jun 2nd, 2010, 2:25am

on 06/01/10 at 22:11:16, Fritzlein wrote:
I have no objection to discussing the subjective experience of Arimaa.  I took your opening post, however, as an invitation to develop a subjective narrative about why Arimaa is better than chess, along the lines of the narrative some people have as to why Go is better than chess.  I think it is legitimate for me to give the reasons why I think developing such a narrative would be a net negative for the Arimaa community.

Now you have clarified that your proposal was merely to talk about what Arimaa feels like, including how it feels different from other games.  I'm cool with that, and wouldn't want to interfere.  Heck, I've done it myself, saying that Arimaa is to chess as wrestling is to boxing.  I apologize for the extent to which my post came across as saying, "Because I don't care to discuss mushy subjective stuff, no one should."

From my first post in this thread, I had two separate reactions that I apparently didn't keep separate well enough: a reaction to talking about games philosophically per se, and a reaction to using nebulous criteria to put down one's non-favorite games.  I'm sorry for the extent to which I let those bleed into each other.

I'm glad for the direction the thread has taken since then.  <bows out>

[sighs] Yeah, and it's entirely my fault you got that impression. Sorry... You know, that's part of the Arimaa experience as well: the fantastic Arimaa community, where even when we disagree we're still such cool guys... Thanks Fritz. :)

I'm surprised myself at the level of reaction this thread's got. I'm sure things will come to mind as we go along.

Like this one:

The Elephant. Most powerful piece on the board, free to do as he pleases. Everybody wants to be the elephant.

Or would you? He's more busy than anyone else, constantly flitting back and forth trying to juggle all the balls. He's not really free to do what he likes, because when the smaller, naiver pieces get themselves into trouble it's him who's got to go and save them. And heaven help him when the camel gets into trouble! The commander of the board becomes a prisoner, forced to camp out next to a trap to save his deputy. The two most powerful pieces in the army can only stare at each other while their comrades get demolished.

Oh, the burdens of leadership...
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Hippo on Jun 2nd, 2010, 2:39am
I have liked to play chess when I was child, but at age around 15 it seemed to me I got the level memorization become much more important and I have chosen to prefere being better mathematican than chess player with better database.

Arimaa is really young game and this is why it's theory is only in beginning. Having been undersood as chess, it would not interest me. I have discovered it previous year and I was very surprised how fast I get near the top. The only reason is ... so far we are all beginners.

I am eager to learn and I am so busy ... so I have no option to learn as much as possible from each game I play/or study. I am not sure how long I would stay in the comunity (as currently it took almost all my free time), but may be having some students to code bots would be enough incentive ...

I love go, but I have not played it at any turnament. I consider it to be lost time for me.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by leo on Jun 2nd, 2010, 12:46pm
@Fireborn: Yes it makes sense to see friendly neighbor's help that way. There's somewhat of the Lion and Mouse fable in it too, for even a rabbit can free the camel from the elephant.

After a long time without playing I've discovered that my way of perceiving the board and playing has evolved in a radical way. I'm making horrible blunders the kind I made when I first played but I feel more confident about positioning and feeling the balance of forces. Fritzlein just reminded about his wrestling metaphor, and it's really what I feel: the game's "state of matter" is somewhere between solid and liquid, full of surprises but not eerie.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by rozencrantz on Jun 11th, 2010, 3:45pm
It's easy to wax poetic about your favorite game, but it's hard for non-initiates (and maybe even initiates) to actually know what you mean.

I've been reading "The Master of Go" by Yasunari Kawabata, and there's a part where the reporter meets and plays some games with an American. His reaction to the American's play style is a fascinating read. It got me thinking about the role that games play for us.

A lot of the abstract gamers I've known are math/science types, who think about the games as puzzles, and enjoy analysis. I think I read recently about a method of scoring Go that encourages more analytical play.

That's a huge contrast with Kawabata's stance that a game is primarily an art, and that one should strive for creative plays. That's definitely how I approach games, and it's a lot of what attracted me to Arimaa. I can lose nine out of ten games, but if I won that one game with a creative idea, that makes me happy. On the other hand, if I win nine out of ten games by imitating things I read on the wiki, I'll be disappointed.

It might seem strange, but the games that feel most similar to Arimaa to me are fighting games. Both offer a kind of asymmetry that allows for a lot of personalization, and both allow for a very personal, expressive style of play.

That might be something true of many other games, but those are the two places I've lived it, and it's what draws me to both. The lack of certain knowledge in Arimaa, as contrasted with Chess or Go, adds to that sense.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Jun 17th, 2010, 9:21pm
I've just discovered Fritzlein's Arimaa review on BBG (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/110510/arimaa-is-well-on-its-way-to-becoming-a-classic-). I love Fritzlein's eloquent way of explaining what's so special about Arimaa. My favourite bit is the following, where he answer's Jim Getzen's question about why he should take up Arimaa instead of go or chess.

My final comparison is very subjective: I have a vastly different experience internally when I play Arimaa than when I play chess. Despite several years of studying chess, I never got beyond approaching chess in highly tactical terms, i.e., "If I do X, then he can do Y, then I can do Z," etc. In Arimaa I am virtually forced not to think that way, because there are about 15,000 possible moves in the average position. It is common for my opponents to make moves I haven't considered at all, even in postal games where I may have studied the position for over an hour. Therefore out of necessity I have to evaluate Arimaa moves on vague terms such as "influence", "initiative", "mobility", and so on. I am simply unable to cover enough of the bases with I-do-he-does thinking to rely on it.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Arimaa is all strategy and no tactics. On the contrary, Arimaa is a highly tactical game. It is merely that when my opponent in chess makes a move I didn't consider, I'm 90% likely to have blundered, whereas when my opponent in Arimaa makes a move I didn't consider, I'm only 10% likely to have blundered.

In the 1999 chess game Kasparov vs. The World, Kasparov said that he "lost control" of the game in the middlegame. He didn't mean he was losing, he meant the position was so complex and the lines so varied, he just had to play his best move and hope he didn't stumble into disadvantage "by accident". Well, I'm currently the world's #1 Arimaa player by more than 100 points, and I feel that I "lose control" of nearly all of my Arimaa games. I can almost never be sure that my opponent has no counterplay, or that my plan is stronger, faster, and better. There's no way to play other than to take a good guess at a move and hope.

Jim Getzen's response was: "Well, you've persuasively answered my question. I'll definitely take another look at Arimaa."

Great stuff Fritz!
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 17th, 2010, 10:12pm
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.  Is that what you meant by the philosophy of Arimaa?  I wouldn't expect this to necessarily apply to anyone else, but in my own life Arimaa has been a metaphor for learning to be less in control, make more mistakes, and learn from the process.  And chessandgo is teaching me that it is OK to be #2.  ;)
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Jun 18th, 2010, 7:02am

on 06/17/10 at 22:12:00, Fritzlein wrote:
Is that what you meant by the philosophy of Arimaa?

Yeah pretty much. I'm not very good at expressing myself. :)

We've talked about "the zone" before, and although I know it's a pretty hazy concept I suppose you could describe it as a perception, a state of mind you have when you're playing the game.

Although everybody's "zone" is probably different I'm sure we've all have something similar to you in the sense of "losing control" and having to go on your hunches, and that's just one aspect of the unique experience Arimaa has to offer. I was trying to say that if we can find artistic or analogous ways of expressing that experience, it would help to attract a more philosophical kind of player who might not find the game quite so appealing when described in technical terms.

That conversation you had with Jim Getzen was, I think, a perfect example of this. When you tell him, "Arimaa  has the potential to rival chess and go", he's impressed, but he still thinks of it as just another abstract strategy game with a few mods. And with the disadvantage of not being as well known as chess or go. But when you described why the experience of playing Arimaa is unique he was interested.

So perhaps I should have entitled this thread "How to express the Arimaa experience."

(If there's anybody who'd like to describe their own experience, feel free to chip in at any point.)
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by omar on Jun 19th, 2010, 5:09am
> Arimaa is to chess as wrestling is to boxing

> With spectator numbers and gate receipts that would turn any chess organiser green with envy, with centers in Los Angeles, London, Berlin and Siberia, chess boxing is becoming a real success story.
http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6386

Anyone up for Arimaa-wrestling :-)

> ... when my opponent in chess makes a move I didn't consider, I'm 90% likely to have blundered, whereas when my opponent in Arimaa makes a move I didn't consider, I'm only 10% likely to have blundered

That explains why I'm able to play Arimaa better than chess :-)
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by leo on Jun 21st, 2010, 5:15pm

on 06/19/10 at 05:09:32, omar wrote:
Anyone up for Arimaa-wrestling :-)

LOL!
That would make a good cartoon.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by aozeba on Aug 4th, 2010, 1:05am
I'm a strategy boardgame newbie, but I have already begun using Arimaa as a metaphor for my life.

I'm currently in the process of starting up and building a Non-Profit Organization, and as we begin organizing students and developing our different projects, I imagine myself moving the pieces around the board: two moves here, another move there, and with the fourth move we wait to see what the effects of our turn will be. Never sure how the world will react, but with a definite endgame in mind, and even if we're not exactly sure how we're going to get there, with each move it seems we get a little closer.

I feel like the complexity of Arimaa, the fact that its so new and no one is truly an expert, the fact that you can't (yet) simply plug a function into your computer and win, make Arimaa an especially good metaphor for a new endeavor such as our group, or starting a small business, or going off to college to study a young field.

There's no set recipe for success, only the experiences of a few intrepid pioneers. You never know quite what will happen in the next turn. You can try your hardest to guess, but surprises will always pop up.

The only other strategy game I've ever had this sort of connection with wasn't a board game at all, it was StarCraft, a real time strategy video game.

---- WARNING:This next part will only make sense if you have played starcraft. ----

I ran a voter registration drive once, and as I was evaluating which apartment complex we should register next, how many people I should send there, whose car we were going to use, etc, the voice reminders from the game kept popping into my head - WE REQUIRE MORE VESPENE GAS - SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS - YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS. Turning it into a game made what could have been a hectic, stressful job much more fun!

---- OK normal people can join back in now ----

So when I read the name of this thread, I was like "Yeah, megajester, I know exactly what you mean."

I discovered Arimaa through a random wikibooks browse, and was originally intrigued because part of the stated purpose of the game was to show the differences between human and machine intelligence. Thats a philosophical reason to play, and its what gets peoples attention when I tell them about Arimaa. We all know that in some respects computers are smarter than us (making fast mathematical calculations, etc) but we also know that we are smarter than them in much more subjective and difficult to describe ways.

The reason I was attracted to Arimaa is that it seems to require the sort of fuzzy thinking that people do all the time but that (thus far) has proved very difficult to emulate in code. Of course, eventually it might be possible to brute force your way through the game, but I think we might be surprised how long people stay ahead on this one.

Philosophy!
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by speek on Aug 4th, 2010, 9:34am
I wanted a chance to chime in on the differences/similarities of chess/go/arimaa.  The first 50-100 moves of Go is the best game experience I know of, because of the wide-open-ness of the game at that point, the loose shapes that develop that define the strategy used, the almost incomprehensibility of the value or reason of any given move.

But I won't play Go on computers or over the internet because  when victory has to be determined by computer, you have to play the game out, and I find very few things as dull as the last 100 moves of a game of Go.  Talk about accounting.  I'll only play the game live and friendly because I want to discontinue and just talk about the game at some fairly early point.

Chess, for me is like being a fish in water.  I've played since I was 3.  It's comfortable.  It's got personality.  It's got the best winning condition of any game ever.  The game gets more subtle and more interesting as the pieces dwindle and the game gets longer, as opposed to the other way around.  In fact, with only 1-2 major pieces left for each side, it practically morphs into a different game altogether, which is fantastic.  Sadly, the game isn't big enough, and large swaths of chess require a lot of memorization at the level I play at, and computers are king, which is just plain galling.  Great game.  Past it's use-by date though.

I've only played 50 or so games of Arimaa, but it's got a lot of what I like about chess.  A game of Arimaa makes a story-line, like a chess game does.  It's got a pretty good winning condition - better than Go's, not as good as chess.  It is supremely methodical, which can be good or bad, depending on what you like.  I find the game takes a great deal more patience than chess does.  Working out a capture can take dozens of moves, as opposed to chess, where at most it takes 10.  So far, humans are better than computers, which is good.

One more thing about Arimaa - my impression is that we all are not very good.  I don't know how the top players feel, but I don't think those 2600 ratings are similar to a 2600 rating in chess.  I rather think today's kings of Arimaa are like the Ruy Lopez's of 500 years ago, and we have a long ways to go before Morphy and Steinitz show up and change the way the game is played :-)
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Aug 4th, 2010, 4:58pm

on 08/04/10 at 09:34:48, speek wrote:
One more thing about Arimaa - my impression is that we all are not very good.  I don't know how the top players feel, but I don't think those 2600 ratings are similar to a 2600 rating in chess.  I rather think today's kings of Arimaa are like the Ruy Lopez's of 500 years ago, and we have a long ways to go before Morphy and Steinitz show up and change the way the game is played :-)

Well, I used to have a 2600 WHR rating.  :P  I think you are right on target that some future player will re-write Arimaa strategy like Steinitz did for chess, and that will be as far from exhausting Arimaa as Steinitz was from exhausting chess.  So in that sense my rating was not comparable to a 2600 rating in chess.

On the other hand, we use the same Elo formula that chess ratings use.  In both games a 2600 player is 3/4 likely to beat a 2400 player, who is 3/4 likely to beat a 2200 player, etc.  The distance between me and an average Arimaa player is the same as the distance between a newly minted chess grandmaster and an average chess player.  Therefore, since the math is the same in both cases, when you say that Arimaa ratings are not comparable to chess ratings, you are implying that Arimaa has more rungs in its intrinsic ladder of skill than chess has.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by 99of9 on Aug 4th, 2010, 7:02pm

on 08/04/10 at 16:58:31, Fritzlein wrote:
On the other hand, we use the same Elo formula that chess ratings use.  In both games a 2600 player is 3/4 likely to beat a 2400 player, who is 3/4 likely to beat a 2200 player, etc.  The distance between me and an average Arimaa player is the same as the distance between a newly minted chess grandmaster and an average chess player.  Therefore, since the math is the same in both cases, when you say that Arimaa ratings are not comparable to chess ratings, you are implying that Arimaa has more rungs in its intrinsic ladder of skill than chess has.

I think his observation was more temporal.  A rating of 2600 in chess now does not mean the same intrinsic quality of moves as a rating of 2600 was 100 years ago, because the mean playing standard can shift.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by speek on Aug 4th, 2010, 8:00pm
Yes, the ratings reflect how much better you are than your contemporaries (which I have no doubt about, mr Fritzlein!), but where Morphy was leaps and bounds better than any of his opponents (and probably including Steinitz, who avoided playing him), which probably would have earned him a 2800 or 2900 rating at the time, if they used it, he did not play as well as a 2800 grandmaster of 80 years later.

Also, I suspect that Arimaa, in the long run,  will have a larger range of playing ability than chess.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Aug 4th, 2010, 9:29pm

on 08/04/10 at 19:02:14, 99of9 wrote:
I think his observation was more temporal.  A rating of 2600 in chess now does not mean the same intrinsic quality of moves as a rating of 2600 was 100 years ago, because the mean playing standard can shift.

In fact, there were no chess ratings 100 years ago.  FIDE only adopted the Elo system in 1970, so we only have 40 years of rating history to debate whether ratings are inflating or not.  I think it is clear that Steinitz played nowhere near as well as a 2600-rated player of today.  What was unclear to me until I read the history of chess ratings is that the difference has nothing to do with rating inflation across a century and more.  These numbers have been retroactively assigned to historical players based on highly arbitrary scalings which are justified mostly by not wanting to be insulting to the titans of the past.

The rise of chess engines as strong as Rybka should now make it possible to give some objective rating to past masters of chess based on their recorded games.  I would be very interested to see just how much stronger modern chess grandmasters are on an absolute scale.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by rbarreira on Aug 5th, 2010, 1:38am
Fritz I'm curious, how would you use a chess engine to assign ratings to past players?
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Aug 5th, 2010, 4:22am

on 08/05/10 at 01:38:19, rbarreira wrote:
Fritz I'm curious, how would you use a chess engine to assign ratings to past players?

Have the engine look at recorded games.  For each move, have the engine note the difference in evaluation between the best move and the move actually played.  For each player, track the percentage of time they played the best move, and track the median error of how much equity they gave away via inaccuracies.

The methodology could be calibrated and validated using games of modern players with known ratings.  If it doesn't give sensible results for contemporaries, then never mind applying it to historical games.  But my hunch is that chess engines are now so strong that their evaluations are close enough to objective truth to accurately predict ratings based on game records alone.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by speek on Aug 5th, 2010, 6:51am
Such a study has been done, but I believe it used Crafty, and only gave Crafty something like 1 second to evaluate a move, and thus many many games were examined.  If I remember, Morphy and Capablanca came out very well in this study.  They had some strange explanation for why it didn't matter that Crafty with 1 second doesn't even play at a Grandmaster level itself.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by ThrustVectoring on Aug 23rd, 2010, 5:52pm

on 06/01/10 at 13:47:56, FireBorn wrote:
I feel like arimaa is some sort of in-between of chess and go in a sense. It is a game of "balance" like go, but it looks and feels more like chess due to the pieces and the way they move around the board. I suppose this is why I like it. Go is too abstract for me, and chess is too rigid. Arimaa is a nice in-between.


I have a similar feeling on it. Arimaa has the reductionist theme from Chess, and the positional struggle theme of Go. Ultimately, getting rid of the opponents pieces is only a means to an end - getting a winning position.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Sep 6th, 2010, 11:44am
Well, thanks everybody for all your 2 cents, I have a sack of pennies now! Thank you for your insights and experiences. I started this not knowing which question I wanted to ask, let alone the answer, so thanks too for giving me the benefit of the doubt when I ended up spouting gibberish.

My "question" could be summed up as follows. We know that chess players, more than anybody else, are likely to be interested in Arimaa. However if we fall into the trap of only explaining Arimaa through chess, proving to them it's a worthy abstract strategy game, they can turn around to us and say "Well, I'm already playing an abstract strategy game, ie. chess, so...?" Fritzlein's discussion with Jim Getzen on BBG (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/110510/arimaa-is-well-on-its-way-to-becoming-a-classic-) would be an example of this. Not that Fritz fell into that trap as such, but you get the idea.

So what I wanted to do was find a way to describe what makes Arimaa so different to any other game. Not better, just different.

To illustrate: You like apples and I want to sell you a pear. If I say "Hey, you like apples. Check out this pear, it's almost exactly like an apple," you could say "Nah, thanks, I've already got an apple." But if I then say, "I know you've got your apple, but you know what, pears are something else, they're like nothing you've ever tasted before..." you might be a bit more interested.

We all agree that playing Arimaa has a completely different "feel" to any game we've every played before. So if we could find a way to describe it, to tell people that Arimaa is just as deep a strategy game as they've ever played, and yet is something completely different that they just *have* to try, it might help.

So here's my shot at the "answer". All comments and criticism are welcome.

Getting Into the Arimaa Zone

Some might think of Arimaa as a chess variant. The next chess. Chess reborn. Chess reloaded.

But Arimaa is so much more than that. But why? The answer is strangely elusive. There are so many different perspectives and opinions - but most of these seem to have something in common. That something could be called "the Arimaa zone."

So what is the Arimaa zone?

Some might say it feels like jumping into an unending ocean, looking down and being gripped by the vertigo of deep blue infinity. And yet it's not an equation to be solved by brainpower alone - it's organic, human. It's a wide world, but within your grasp.

Some might say it feels like the adrenaline of commanding a vast army. The rush of comprending in one moment the whole with all its parts, shifting and undulating, ebbing and flowing in majestic symphony.

Because a game of Arimaa isn't a game of thrusts and parries, flashes and bangs. It's a game of life. Complex, and yet elegantly simple. Intricate, yet reassuringly intuitive. It's an epic struggle, a story of many twists and turns, where each move writes a new line in the saga, turns a new page in your unfolding destiny.

Arimaa really is a new universe on 64 squares.

So what are you waiting for? Come and discover your Arimaa zone!
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by omar on Sep 15th, 2010, 8:06pm

Quote:
Arimaa really is a new universe on 64 squares.


What amazes me is how vast it is. Even with just 64 squares.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Feb 18th, 2011, 12:24pm
While posting in another thread I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with my dad not long after I showed him the game.

He was musing that Arimaa is a better simulation of real-world decision making than chess, because chess is very linear and deals in definites, calculating many moves into the future, while Arimaa is a question of weighing many different objectives and factors, and choosing between lines of action all of which lead very quickly into the unknown.

I thought I'd go through what everybody posted all those months ago, and it was a great read! Thanks!
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by akensond on Feb 18th, 2011, 10:54pm
Your dad sounds pretty wise megajester.  Life is flux interupted by ontological ivestments that drive us to seek the unknown.  Heaven or hell, it doesn't much matter as long as there is a telos to strive toward.

Arimaa is barely managed chaos that appears to have some deep secret to explore amidst the mess of moving pieces.  That's what is most interesting for me.  It's hard in life to move forward if you actually don't believe there is a point to it, but Arimaa insists that no matter what confusion ensues; no matter the set back, the goal is clear, but just out of reach: get that rabbit to the other side!  Yes, it is a good simulation of life.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by omar on Feb 20th, 2011, 6:35pm
Now, if we could get GK to write a book about it, that would be awesome :-)

http://www.howlifeimitateschess.com/

A quote from the back cover:
"Rote memorization is far less important than the ability to recognize meaningful patterns"
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by akensond on Feb 21st, 2011, 4:46am
Gk is right.  That's what bored me about chess despite loving the game.  At my school club the best players tended to spend more time reading about openings and endgame theory - positional verses attacking style or whatever, and less time experiencing the joy of surprise, creativity and discovery.

Come Monday I would be the benificiary of the latest book on the subject.

Arimaa celebrates uncertainty from the initial Fisher-like setup to the chaos of the middle game, to the 'rabbit run' of the endgame.  

Let me risk a little of my soul:  

'One man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life'

To those who cringe (like Fritzlein of the quote above) at the mere thought of philosophising about Arimaa, it is too late, it is not just an independent product of a machine, but of the human mind and its long history.  

As Fritz Juhnke (not Fritzlein) poetically put it in his book 'We think that we play games against each other, but the true game is the one that each of us plays against the invisible part of his own soul'.  I agree.

That's why some like me are beginning to speak 'gibberish' about this game - it seems special; it seems worth thinking about and exposing a little of that hidden bit of soul.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Feb 21st, 2011, 5:32am
In Fritz's defence, I think he had got the wrong end of the stick and that was mostly because that was the end of the stick I was handing to him. :) Sometimes even I look back at some of what I wrote and cringe.

I also don't like it when people try to show off how "deep" they are by playing philosopher, coming up with some analogy and then making wishy-washy Captain Obvious statements about life, the universe and everything, and pretending their analogy has somehow made them more spiritual and given them meaning in life or whatever. When I wrote what I did I was trying to give a different impression, but I wasn't very successful.

I think analogies are a great way to give you a new angle on things that can show you new possibilities. I don't know what Kasparov has done with his book, but I don't expect he's saying "Chess teaches you how to be a businessman", probably more like "Chess is a bit like business because of x, y and z. When we look at chess there's also a, b and c. And do you know what, when we look at business that's also similar."

It's a bit like the book The Society of Mind that someone posted about the other day (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=other;action=display;num=1298044441), analogies can be useful as mental frameworks to help you understand something complicated faster.

You have to approach analogies a bit like the associative fallacy Humphrey Appleby mentions in Yes Minister: "All dogs have four legs; my cat has four legs. Therefore, my cat is a dog." Wrong, of course. But if I already know all about dogs, and somebody starts telling me about cats and says "It has four legs, a tail, fur..." I will respond by saying "Oh so they're a lot like dogs then" and be able to correctly guess a lot of a cat's features: It has eyes, a snout, can be domesticated etc. A useful analogy, then. However I would need to confirm this information, because when I guess that cats run in packs and bark I would be on the wrong track. So as useful as it is, for me to latch on to my analogy and proclaim it a font of all wisdom would be silly.

So I'm not saying that Arimaa analogies can teach me anything per se, just that perhaps they can give me a new angle on things and give me ideas that may turn out to be right. I also think that making such analogies may help us to express just how deep, rich and fascinating Arimaa is as a strategy game, and that it's worth anybody's while to take a closer look.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by Fritzlein on Feb 21st, 2011, 10:37am

on 02/21/11 at 04:46:42, akensond wrote:
'One man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life'

Just last week I was reflecting on the possibility that someone has already told me the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, and that I dismissed it because I didn't like the consequences of it being true.  Or I dismissed the answer because I was asking the wrong question.  Or I dismissed the answer because I wasn't asking any question at all, i.e. I wasn't in "learning mode", so I couldn't absorb any new wisdoms.  So to my reflection that one man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life, I should add that what appears to be gibberish this year may appear to be deep truth next year, even for the same person.


Quote:
To those who cringe (like Fritzlein of the quote above) at the mere thought of philosophising about Arimaa, it is too late, it is not just an independent product of a machine, but of the human mind and its long history.  

As Fritz Juhnke (not Fritzlein) poetically put it in his book 'We think that we play games against each other, but the true game is the one that each of us plays against the invisible part of his own soul'.  I agree.

I am glad that what I wrote in my book is able to redeem, at least in part, what I wrote in this thread.  :)


Quote:
That's why some like me are beginning to speak 'gibberish' about this game - it seems special; it seems worth thinking about and exposing a little of that hidden bit of soul.

And for me too, Arimaa has been a teacher, even sometimes when I didn't feel like learning.  Take my loss yesterday against Hippo, for example.  I have a tendency to verge between arrogance when I am winning and despair when I am losing, not just in Arimaa, but in my life as a whole.  Compared to the rest of my life, however, Arimaa is simple enough that I can concretely see that neither arrogance nor despair is warranted, but rather humility.  I can directly identify that several of my recent losses (including to Hippo, chessandgo, and hanzack) are attributable to my weak goal attack/defense despite having a decent control position.  Arimaa is showing me what I don't know, not to punish me, but simply because I don't know it.  That is how ignorance works in life too.  If you don't know the wall is there, you keep bumping into the wall until you do know it is there.

I suppose that if games had no bearing on the rest of life, it would be difficult to justify playing games at all.  This thread must have a place in the forum if Arimaa is to have a place in society.  And here I am joining in after I said I wouldn't.  ::)

That said, I still wonder why so many accounts of meaningful experiences need to belittle something else.  However much Arimaa has benefited my soul, can I say that I would have benefited less from spending those hours playing a different game, or watching a spider, or growing turnips, or (yes, even) keeping books?  Did Ghandi's soul benefit from cleaning out bedpans?  I remain glad that most of the philosophizing in this thread hasn't been along the lines of "Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting."  Whatever I have learned about life from playing Arimaa, even if I didn't learn it from playing chess, I am not about to say that I couldn't have learned it from playing chess.  To say further that no one else could have learned certain life lessons from playing chess seems so presumptuous that I hope I wouldn't ever say it, unless I was having a bad day.   :)

This is not to say that comparisons are out of bounds, or that it is wrong to think Arimaa is a better game than chess.  Heck, I think Arimaa is a better game than chess, and not just for me personally, but according to some semi-objective criteria.  Megajester's purpose in this thread, however, was to think of less sterile ways to promote Arimaa than, say, "Arimaa has very close to 50% win rate for each side, unlike chess which is 55%-45% in favor of white."  I personally prefer and would be more persuaded by the more concrete statements, but even if people want to make fuzzy comparisons, it makes a big difference how we get fuzzy.

A dollop of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.  Telling chess players that they should switch to Arimaa because chess is all rote memorization isn't going to work, because chess isn't all rote memorization, as Kasparov insists in the line quoted by Omar.  Saying (or implying) that chess is just rote memorization insults and alienates chess players.  The line of persuasion that seems to work for me is that Arimaa has more of that wonderful thing that chess has that makes chess such a great game.  Many chess players dislike the memorization of openings, and they would be happy to do less of it, but they have to memorize openings in order to get to the good stuff without being at a disadvantage when they get there.  We should acknowledge the "good stuff" of chess while trying to convert chess players, or else they will conclude (perhaps correctly) that we have no idea what makes chess a great game, and are therefore unqualified to extol Arimaa's relative merits.

Alternatively, we can just report our subjective experiences, like this fellow on Board Game Geek: "After a valid attempt to like [Arimaa] I've determined that it leaves me flat. As an alternative to chess I would recommend Shogi, although western chess is in no need of improvements."  So, Arimaa leaves him flat.  What to say?  Is he wrong?  I don't like spicy food; is that wrong?  The Romans said de gustibus non est disputandum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandum).  It makes sense to me that if we are just reporting what games we like to play for purely subjective reasons, then it is wise to do it in a non-argue-ish way.
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by qswanger on Mar 13th, 2011, 8:25pm

on 02/20/11 at 18:35:55, omar wrote:
Now, if we could get GK to write a book about it, that would be awesome :-)

http://www.howlifeimitateschess.com/

A quote from the back cover:
"Rote memorization is far less important than the ability to recognize meaningful patterns"


Thanks for the link Omar. I'm always on the lookout for good book recommendations. I went ahead and purchased this and I'm reading it now. The content and author are obviously of interest to me and so far it's an interesting and compelling concoction of business & chess history, decision-making advice, self-help, and memoir. A memorable, pithy quote from GK on page 31 is: "The virtue of innovation only rarely compensates for the vice of inadequacy." Recommended!
Title: Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
Post by megajester on Nov 12th, 2011, 2:09pm
Now this (http://www.jlevitt.dircon.co.uk/aeschess.htm) is the sort of thing I had wanted to do for Arimaa...


Arimaa Forum » Powered by YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.3.1!
YaBB © 2000-2003. All Rights Reserved.