Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Exploring Algorithms To Recognize Similar Board States In Arimaa, Malik Khaleeque Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

The game of Arimaa was invented as a challenge to the field of game-playing artificial intelligence, which had grown somewhat haughty after IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue trounced world champion Kasparov at chess. Although Arimaa is simple enough for a child to learn and can be played with an ordinary chess set, existing game-playing algorithms and techniques have had a difficult time rising up to the challenge of defeating the world's best human Arimaa players, mainly due to the game's impressive branching factor. This thesis introduces and analyzes new algorithms and techniques that attempt to recognize similar board states based on …