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        Arimaa >> Bot Development >> Strategies to beat bots
        
(Message started by: fotland on Sep 3^rd, 2003, 10:08am)

Title: Strategies to beat bots
Post by fotland on Sep 3^rd, 2003, 10:08am

What's your favorite strategy to beat a bot? I've seen several:

1) get an advanced rabbit with some strong pieces nearby, and sacrifice a lot of material to distract the bot while you creat an unstoppable goal threat

2) Outplay it around the traps and get ahead in material.

3) Keep your own pieces back and force it to come to you, then pin its pieces near your traps defending each other, so you have an advantage on the rest of the board.

Any others?

David

Title: Re: Strategies to beat bots
Post by 99of9 on Sep 3^rd, 2003, 11:49am

In some ways this is similar to #1:

4) Stack all your best pieces on one side of the board (right or left), then expel all the bot pieces from that side, then you can just advance your rabbit nearly for free.

Title: Re: Strategies to beat bots
Post by 99of9 on Sep 3^rd, 2003, 12:15pm

One I beat speedy with the other day. Though actually I didn't plan this, it just happened.

5) Let the bot "trap" one of your bigish pieces (in my case it was a horse) but crush it on the rest of the board:

I defended my piece with my elephant only. The bot realised that if I moved my elephant, my horse would die, so was very keen to make sure my horse stayed on the trap. To do this the bot had to block the 3 other sides with pieces at least as big as a horse. In my case I think it blocked with elephant, camel, and horse. Because it had used so much of it's own material in the blockade, I outnumbered it on the rest of the board where I could rampage at will.

Title: Re: Strategies to beat bots
Post by omar on Sep 11^th, 2003, 11:51pm

I was really amazed that this worked on Speedy; you can pull something like this on shallowBlue or Arimaazilla, but it usually doesn't work on the stronger bots; maybe Jeff didn't know that :-). Then again it was an earlier version of Speedy; so this might not work anymore.

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/showGame.cgi?gid=2187&client=1

Omar

Title: Re: Strategies to beat bots
Post by fotland on Sep 12^th, 2003, 1:22am

on 09/11/03 at 23:51:04, omar wrote:

I fixed this after that game, so it won't value this kind of trap control when it is using more strength than it is trapping.