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Go was the last perfect information game I knew where the best humans outperformed the best computers. Anyone know any others? Are all perfect information games lost at this point? Can we design one to keep us winning?


I know of one attempt to design such a game: Arimaa. Playable on a chess board, Arimaa has an even bigger game tree than Go. It's a great game, and fun to play, but as an anti-computer design it has recently failed.

There has been an annual humans vs computers challenge match every year since 2004, and in 2015 computers won with David Wu's software "Sharp". Despite the very high branching factor, standard chess AI techniques turned out to be applicable when combined with high quality hand written heuristics for positional evaluation and candidate move generation. The software is described in detail here:

http://icosahedral.net/downloads/djwu2015arimaa_color.pdf


Why bother? It's working with radically incomplete and imperfect information where the core of human intelligence actually lies.


> Why bother?

Because the process might tell us something interesting and useful about AI and ourselves.




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