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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> in the mind of Omar Syed?
        
(Message started by: KingElephant on May 4^th, 2012, 10:01am)

Title: in the mind of Omar Syed?
Post by KingElephant on May 4^th, 2012, 10:01am

What I imagine inside the mind of the creator of Arimaa

I imagine that Omar Syed might have had these things in mind while inventing Arimaa:
Chess is good, but it needs to be fixed in certain ways.

Problems with chess to be fixed in the new game:

Why does the king hide like a coward? The most important piece should be forward and active at all times.

Why do the strong pieces begin at the back, hemmed in by the weaker pawns? In the new game, the strong pieces will line up in front.

A move such as pawn takes queen is unrealistic: a small unit should not be able to destroy a larger unit.

Medieval terminology like knight, bishop, queen and king is outdated. Familiar animals would make better symbols for the new game.

Remembering how each piece moves in its specific manner confuses people. All the pieces should simply move one square orthogonally in the new game.

The move knight to the bishop’s third square ( using descriptive notation ) is so boringly standard, those squares should be off limits somehow.

Calling the sides white and black has racial overtones, so change it to gold and silver.

Draws are awful, find a way to eliminate draws.

Chess has been mastered and conquered by computers. The new game must be a challenge for computing and artificial intelligence.

Good things about chess to be kept in the new game:

Pawn promotion is good; in fact it is so good it should end the game immediately.

Pawns should not be allowed to move backwards.

The set of pieces and the size of the board are fine, no need to change them.

And once these criteria had been satisfied, Arimaa was born.

Title: Re: in the mind of Omar Syed?
Post by rbarreira on May 4^th, 2012, 10:19am

Interesting thread, but I can't help nitpicking:

Quote:

a small unit should not be able to destroy a larger unit.

This one doesn't work as weak units can capture larger units in chess as well as Arimaa.

Title: Re: in the mind of Omar Syed?
Post by Arimabuff on May 4^th, 2012, 11:28am

on 05/04/12 at 10:19:47, rbarreira wrote:

Interesting thread, but I can't help nitpicking:

This one doesn't work as weak units can capture larger units in chess as well as Arimaa.

Hence the spectacular elephant capture that happens once in a great while.

Title: Re: in the mind of Omar Syed?
Post by minderbinder on May 4^th, 2012, 11:52am

Sometimes it doesn't seem clear which piece did the capturing. If player suicides one of his pieces during a move (lets say he pulls his elephant away from a framed horse or something), which piece can we say actually captured the horse? Was it the piece that originally pushed the horse there? What if the horse moved there on its own? Is it the ones preventing the horse from leaving? Is it whatever made the player withdraw his elephant?

Title: Re: in the mind of Omar Syed?
Post by omar on May 4^th, 2012, 8:43pm

Actually, it was not that many constraints. I gave a talk at a BGG con and talked about this a bit:

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/Videos

Title: Re: in the mind of Omar Syed?
Post by 99of9 on May 6^th, 2012, 8:55pm

on 05/04/12 at 10:01:25, KingElephant wrote:

Why does the king hide like a coward?

Why do the strong pieces begin at the back, hemmed in by the weaker pawns?

A move such as pawn takes queen is unrealistic.

Medieval terminology like knight, bishop, queen and king is outdated.

To be fair to chess, I think all those things are fairly realistic representations of what happened on an ancient battlefield.