Editorial

First of all, I would like to thank Jaap van den Herik for his long-term contribution to the ICCA and ICGA Journals across four decades. It is an honor to succeed him as Editor-in-Chief and, on behalf of my editorial colleagues, authors, and readers of the ICGA Journal, I wish him well in continuing with his other activities both inside the community of the International Computer Game Association (ICGA) and outside it. Additionally, I would like to thank Joke Hellemons for her hard work as Jaap’s Editorial Manager. We will all strive to maintain the high standards which they have consistently achieved.

ICGA has long been an important part of the society of computer games, especially for puzzles, board and card games. The formation of the International Computer Chess Association (ICCA) in 1977 gave recognition and opened a forum to chess programmers who were driven by curiosity and competition in the game of chess. The ICCA Journal thus became a repository of this body of expertise, even before DEEP BLUE won the match against Garry Kasparov.

In 2002, the ICCA broadened its interests and became the ICGA, emphasizing the challenges of different types of games, some with partial knowledge, multiple players, and/or random chance. New algorithms and techniques have been discovered and major goals which were once thought impossible have now been achieved. Last year, DeepMind’s ALPHAGO shocked the world in a successful match against the leading Go player Lee Sedol.

In terms of the journal’s future, we have proposed a rotation of acting Editors-in-Chief every two years. I am very happy to see that there are already some candidates who share this position with me, such as Mark Winands and Tristan Cazenave, both of whom have been major contributors to our society. Of course, I welcome the addition of new candidates for this position as well. We are in the process of inviting new Section Editors. I am happy to report that Jiao Wang from Northeastern University in China and Tsan-sheng Hsu from Academia Sinica in Taiwan will be serving as the first two new Section Editors. In addition, I am also pleased that Guy Haworth and Ting han Wei have joined the team, greatly helping the process of putting together this journal. We expect more changes and welcome others to join the ranks, which will be reflected in the coming issues. I look forward to working with the new editorial board in the near future.

Game and model domains are well defined and support the clear demonstration of new computational approaches. I believe our journal should remain focused on these domains with particular emphasis on the application of AI techniques. We should in particular pay closer attention to the advent of deep learning and reinforcement learning. We should also be aware that the variety of games should persist and evolve to foster the discovery and demonstration of new techniques.

In addition to the contributions which are primarily reporting original research, the ICGA Journal can act as a comprehensive record of and commentary on the various events that go on throughout the year. Particularly, we will place emphasis on all the events at the Computer Olympiad. In addition, we should strive for a wider coverage of events such as IEEE WCCI, UEC and GPW competitions. Reports on TAAI and TCGA competitions will also be continued. This way, when members of our community need to find information on the result of events, we will have a complete and easily-accessible place to do so.

We include in this issue a substantial contribution by Jean-Marc Alliot, who proposes a new ranking system for players of chess based on a Markovian interpretation of the game. The new system is able to predict the outcome of matches between players as accurately as the classic Elo rating. A very interesting point is that the new system can be applied to games where a programs far stronger than humans exist. This would no doubt be interesting for more and more games, since the number of programs that outperform humans is steadily increasing.

It has been an exciting process putting together this and subsequent issues, welcoming contributors old and new. May the ICGA community continue to grow and may it add to its catalogue of achievements to date.