Building a Strong Arimaa-playing Program
Graduate Student Seminar
Date: Thursday September 22, 2005
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: CSC 333
Supervisor(s): Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer
Speaker
Haizhi Zhong
Department of Computing ScienceUniversity of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
Details
Arimaa is a two-player game that was intentionally designed to be difficult for computers to play well. In this game, each move is composed of up to 4 steps, which gives Arimaa a large branching factor preventing computer programs from searching deep. We have created an Arimaa-playing program, which contains a multi-functional move generator, an evaluation function, and a search engine with many Alpha-Beta search algorithm enhancements implemented. The large branching factor in Arimaa is challenging, but through some innovative techniques, it can be partially overcome. This has enabled us to create a program strong enough to challenge the current computer champion.
