I think you'd need to force it to use a standard bidding system, since the rules forbid bids that convey private information to your partner. During the play of the hand, a similar rule prevents the defenders from having private information about the meaning of their card plays. You are allowed to do things differently, but each partnership must describe anything non-standard on a "confession card" given to the other team. There are also "cryptographic" bids, which I think are forbidden. These convey information from one partner to the other that depend on jointly held state. Even if the method were disclosed to the opponents, the joint information that's unavailable to them is considered unfair. Rich ------------ Quoting Allan Wechsler <acwacw@gmail.com>:
Arimaa is a game (in my opinion, a fairly ugly one, but maybe it's just my opinion that's ugly) invented on purpose to be hard for computers. I see no reason to expect this to be true. Yes, it has a hellish branching factor, but I would fully expect that it would only take AlphaZero a few hours of thinking about it to smash the best human players.
However, Arimaa was already beaten by an ordinary computer program two years ago!
What about contract bridge?