Advances in Computer Games

1 feel privileged that the J(jh Advances in Computer Games Conference (ACG 10) takes place in Graz, Styria, Austria. It is the frrst time that Austria acts as host country for this major event. The series of conferences started in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1975 and was then held four times in England, three times in The Netherlands, and once in Germany. The ACG-10 conference in Graz is special in that it is organised together with the 11th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC), the Sth Computer Olympiad (CO), and the European Union Y outh Chess Championship. The 11 th WCCC and ACG 10 take place in the Dom im Berg (Dome in the Mountain), a high-tech space with multimedia equipment, located in the Schlossberg, in the centre of the city. The help of many sponsors (large and small) is gratefully acknowledged. They will make the organisation of this conference a success. In particular, 1 would like to thank the European Union for designating Graz as the Cultural Capital of Europe 2003. There are 24 accepted contributions by participants from all over the world: Europe, Japan, USA, and Canada. The specific research results ofthe ACG 10 are expected to tind their way to general applications. The results are described in the pages that follow. The international stature together with the technical importance of this conference reaffrrms the mandate of the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) to represent the computer-games community.

Autorentext
Ernst A. Heinz earned his "Doktor" (Ph.D.) degree with "Auszeichnung"(summa cum laude) from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in July 1999 and joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Boston/Cambridge, USA, as a Postdoctoral Fellow later that year.

Klappentext

This book is the tenth in a well-established series, originally describing the progress of computer-chess research only. While chess has dominated AI work in intelligent game-playing for almost half a century, games presumably harder than chess, such as Go, have moved into the spotlight in recent years. The research reported on herein reflects this growing trend with just 6 out of the 24 works overall still focussing on chess, equally many concentrating on Go, and the remaining 12 relating to checkers, Lines of Action, and a variety of other games.

Inhalt
Evaluation Function Tuning via Ordinal Correlation.- First Experimental Results of ProbCut Applied to Chess.- Search versus Knowledge: An Empirical Study of Minimax on KRK.- Static Recognition of Potential Wins in KNNKB and KNNKN.- Model Endgame Analysis.- Chess Endgames: Data and Strategy.- Evaluation in Go by a Neural Network using Soft Segmentation.- When One Eye is Sufficient: A Static Classification.- DF-PN in Go: An Application to the One-Eye Problem.- Learning to Score Final Positions in the Game of Go.- Monte-Carlo Go Developments.- Static Analysis by Incremental Computation in Go Programming.- Building the Checkers 10-piece Endgame Databases.- The 7-piece Perfect Play Lookup Database for the Game of Checkers.- Search and Knowledge in Lines of Action.- An Evaluation Function for Lines of Action.- Solving 7 × 7 Hex: Virtual Connections and Game-State Reduction.- Automated Identification of Patterns in Evaluation Functions.- An Evaluation Function for the Game of Amazons.- Opponent-Model Search in Bao: Conditions for a Successful Application.- Computer Programming of Kriegspiel Endings: The Case of KR versus K.- Searching with Analysis of Dependencies in a Solitaire Card Game.- Solving the Oshi-Zumo Game.- New Games Related to Old and New Sequences.- Author Index.