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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Passive play
        
(Message started by: pallab on Dec 6^th, 2008, 4:43pm)

Title: Passive play
Post by pallab on Dec 6^th, 2008, 4:43pm

Can the weaker player play passively and defensively and try to hold the game? does this strategy work?

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by Fritzlein on Dec 6^th, 2008, 5:02pm

No, it doesn't work because rabbits can't retreat. If nothing else, the stronger player will be able to pull out rabbits. Once a rabbit is exposed, what can the weaker player do? Let it die? Otherwise they must cross over the board and fight on the other side to save the rabbit instead of being passive.

But anyway, it is often possible to beat a passive player without pulling out rabbits. One can swarm forward instead and take over their traps and tie them in knots.

There was a time when I was afraid that expert defense might be unbreakable, but now it seems we have nothing to fear.

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by pallab on Dec 6^th, 2008, 5:09pm

Ok, what if the rabbits are hidden behind other pieces?. Is there any good example of such a game.

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by Soter on Dec 7^th, 2008, 2:27am

Quote:

Ok, what if the rabbits are hidden behind other pieces?. Is there any good example of such a game.

In such circumstances you may send your elephant forward, flip the guarding piece, uncover the hidden rabbit and pull it. Your opponent may attempt to build a thicker wall but this comes at expense of leaving other rabbits without shelter ( besides you can still flip pieces ). Immo could also work - reluctance to move often makes burying less daunting a task.

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by omar on Dec 7^th, 2008, 11:54pm

Good question Palla. In fact this one has come up a few times before. As Karl mentioned offense is favored a little more than defense. If you tried to keep all your rabbits hidden behind the stronger pieces then your home traps will be very easy to invade and if that happens the situation will fell worse than having rabbits pulled.

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by Fritzlein on Dec 8^th, 2008, 7:08am

on 12/06/08 at 17:09:38, pallab wrote:

Ok, what if the rabbits are hidden behind other pieces?. Is there any good example of such a game.

Your question is difficult to answer because because we can't prove that defensive play is doomed. There are too many possibilities in Arimaa. Obviously we haven't tried them all. There might be a purely passive strategy that works, one we haven't thought of yet, but so far we haven't found any. In our experience to date, when one player takes the strategy of just trying not to lose, that player usually ends up at a disadvantage anyway, and the game doesn't go on forever.

I don't know of a good example of such a game, because I think generally people have given up trying to play that way. Why would you give up all your chance of winning just to lose more slowly? It is normal for people to only try strategies they think will work. But maybe you will be interested in my game yesterday against arimaa_master. He said after the game that in the opening he was just trying to stop my plans, not trying to launch any plans of his own. Eventually he couldn't stop both my elephant-horse plans on one side and my camel plans on the other side at the same time.

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/showGame.cgi?gid=90689&s=w&client=1

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by pallab on Dec 9^th, 2008, 5:25pm

That is an excellent example !

Title: Re: Passive play
Post by omar on Dec 10^th, 2008, 8:41am

Palla, the best way to find the answers to the kind of questions you pose is to really try it out in a few games. The nice thing is that we now have various bots that have an aggressive style and can quickly experiment with them. You would not want to try a defensive strategy with a defensive bot :-)

One time Bomb and Clueless (I think) got into a position where they both wanted to play defensively and the game got into hundreds of moves until David Fotland manually tweeked Bomb on the fly to make it play more aggressive.