I invented a game called Arimaa that could be played with a chess set but the rules were very different to make it harder for computer. I put up a $10k challeng

I invented a game called Arimaa that could be played with a chess set but the rules were very different to make it harder for computer. I put up a $10k challenge to develop an AI that could defeat the top human players. A challenge match was run every year from 2004 to 2015 when it was finally claimed (one year before AI took over Go). There was a variant of Arimaa that I didn't go with since the games did not seem that interesting. It was the same as current Arimaa, but without any trap squares. So no pieces were captured and the game seem to take longer to finish, but I think it may have been a more strategic version (less tactics). I still wonder sometimes if that would have been helped the humans stay ahead a bit longer. I avoided that version since I was not sure if it could lead to deadlock positions. Play testing to check for flaws especially at high level play would be way to much effort for humans. It would be less effort to have an AI check the game rules. Although there is still a big cost to doing that. The AI researchers in the Arimaa community have recently developed an AI that has learned to play Arimaa through self play. They have also brought down the cost of training from about $1 million to about $1 thousand. If anyone is interested, there is a discord channel where we discuss this kind of stuff https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR https://discord.gg/XTAcDjR More information about the Arimaa game as well as a gameroom where you can play it available here: http://arimaa.com/ http://arimaa.com/