Scalable Search In Computer Chess

Das Buch präsentiert neue Ergebnisse der Computerschach-Forschung in den Bereichen der selektiven Vorwärts-Baumbeschneidung, der effizienten Anwendung spieltheoretischen Wissens und des Suchverhaltens bei zunehmender Suchtiefe. Es zeigt, wie man die bereits gut abgestimmte Spielbaumsuche bei immer höheren Suchtiefen noch besser skalierbar macht.

Computers, Chess, and Cognition presents an excellent up-to-date description of developments in computer chess, a rapidly advancing area in artificial intelligence research. This book is intended for an upper undergraduate and above level audience in the computer science (artificial intelligence) community. The chapters have been edited to present a uniform terminology and balanced writing style, to make the material understandable to a wider, less specialized audience. The book's primary strengths are the description of the workings of some major chess programs, an excellent review of tree searching methods, discussion of exciting new research ideas, a philosophical discussion of the relationship of computer game playing to artificial intelligence, and the treatment of computer Go as an important new research area. A complete index and extensive bibliography makes the book a valuable reference work. The book includes a special foreword by Ken Thompson, author of the UNIX operating system.

For many years I have been interested in computer chess and have collected almost every learned paper and article on the subject that I could find. My files are now quite large, and a considerable amount of time, effort and expense has been required to build up this collection. I have often thought how difficult it must be for many computer chess enthusiasts to acquire copies of articles that they see referenced in some other work. Unless one has access to a good reference library, the task is almost impossible. I therefore decided to try to make available, in one volume, as many as possible of the most interesting and important articles and papers ever written on the subject. Such a selection is naturally somewhat subjective, and I hope that I will not offend authors whose works have been excluded. In particular I have decided to exclude any material which has appeared in the Journal of the International Computer Chess Association (ICCA), or in its precursor, the ICCA Newsletter. The reason is simply that the ICCA itself is in the process of compiling a compendium containing the most important material published in those sources. For further information on ICCA membership and publications the reader is invited to contact: Professor H. 1. van den Herik, or Dr Jonathan Schaeffer University of Limburg, Computing Science Dcpaitment, Department of Computer Science University of Alberta, 6200 MD Maastricht Edmonton Netherlands Alberta, Canada T6G 2HI.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Conference on Computers and Games, CG 2001, held in Hamamatsu, Japan in October 2000. The 23 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions and five reviews were carefully refereed and selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on search and strategies, learning and pattern acquisition, theory and complexity issues, and further experiments on game; the reviews presented are on computer language games, computer Go, intelligent agents for computer games, RoboCup, and computer Shogi.

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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advances in Computer Games, ACG 2005, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in September 2005 in conjunction with the 10th Computer Olympiad. It contains 20 papers that cover all aspects of artificial intelligence in computer-game playing.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Rudolf Ahlswede, who passed away in December 2010. The Festschrift contains 36 thoroughly refereed research papers from a memorial symposium, which took place in July 2011. The four macro-topics of this workshop: theory of games and strategic planning; combinatorial group testing and database mining; computational biology and string matching; information coding and spreading and patrolling on networks; provide a comprehensive picture of the vision Rudolf Ahlswede put forward of a broad and systematic theory of search.

This book offers a detailed account of IBM's Deep Blue chess program, the people who created it, and its historic battles with World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. The text examines the progress made by the creators of Deep Blue, beginning with the1989 two-game match against Kasparov. The heroes are: IBM researchers Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, and Joe Hoane, along with team leader Chung-Jen Tan and International Grandmaster Joel Benjamin. The text chronicles one of the great technology achievements of the 20th Century. It establishes the point in history when mankind's exciting new tool, the computer, came of age and competed with its human creators in the ultimate intellectual competition: a game of chess. This book will serve as the premier story documenting that achievement and a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence.