ICGA

The 2023 Computer Olympiad is under way. There are 102 entries and 32 competitions!

Follow the results here.

World Computer Chess Champion: Stoofvlees. The results can be found here.

World Chess Software Champion: Fritz. The results can be found here.

World Computer Speed Chess Champion: Fritz. The results can be found here.

Stoofvlees! Congratulations to Gian-Carlo Pascutto, with opening book by Erdogan Günes. The results can be found here. For those ICGA members who are not familiar with Gian-Carlo and his many accomplishments, here is his biography (Chess Programming Wiki):
Gian-Carlo Pascutto, a Belgian computer scientist, and computer chess and Go programmer with further interests in sound recording and reproduction and digital signal processing. Gian-Carlo is author of the free open source chess and chess variants engine Sjeng, the chess engine Deep Sjeng, which emerged from the closed source Sjeng 12.7 branch since 2003 commercial, the experimental chess engine Stoofvlees, and the Go playing program Leela.

Follow the games live on DGT Live Chess  and Lichess. In the WCCC, programs can use whatever hardware they can beg, borrow, and (hopefully not) steal. This ranges from single machines with many CPUs, machines with multiple fast graphics cards, as well as computing clusters.

Arasan: 24 cores

Fritz: 2x Boston AMD Epyc 9654 (2×96 cores) overclocked; 1.5 TB Ram

Jonny: Cluster of 100 x AMD Epyc 7302 (100×32 cores)

Stoofvlees: AMD Threadripper Pro 5995wx (64 cores, 128 threads); 4x nVidia RTX 4090 256 GB Ram

The results can be found here.

The winner is Fritz. Fritz is one of the best-selling chess programs in the history of computer chess products. The first Fritz became available around 30 years ago. An early version of the program won the 1995 World Computer Chess Championship, with a famous win over Deep Blue.

Congratulations to Frank Schneider, the book developer Wolfgang Zugrav, and the rest of the Fritz team.

The WCSC results can be found here.

Follow the World Chess Software Championships games here. The results to date can be found here.

1. World Computer Chess Championships

We are delighted to be holding the 2023 World Computer Chess Championships in beautiful Valencia, Spain over the period July 8-16. We are grateful to the  Polytechnical University of Valencia and the Valencia Community Chess Federation for their support.

The three events being contested are:

• 2023 World Computer Chess Championship (no hardware limit)
• 2023 World Chess Software Championship (all entrants use the same hardware)
• 2023 World Computer Speed Chess Championship (Blitz)

If you are interested in competing in any of the events, you must enter here by May 31. For more information, contact Jonathan Schaeffer.

2. Computer Olympiad

The 2023 Computer Olympiad will be held online in August. August 8 is the registration deadline. Go for the gold (or silver, or bronze)! More information is available here. Register your program here.

3. Advances in Computer Games Conference

The 2023 Advances in Computer Games conference will be held online November 28-30, 2023. The program co-chairs are Michael Hartisch (University Siegen, Germany) and Chu-Hsuan Hsueh (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan). The submission deadline is September 11.

The Call for Papers can be found here.

4. ICGA President Opportunity

Normally the ICGA President is appointed for a three-year period. I began my term in August 2019. Because of the pandemic, ICGA activities were minimal for a couple of years. Hence I stayed on beyond 2022 so that I could contribute three full years of service to the ICGA. It is my intention to end my term in July 2024.

The ICGA President oversees our (almost) 50-year-old organization. Annually the President initiates the World Computer Chess Championships, Computer Olympiad, and computer games conference (Advances in Computer Gamesand Computers and Games in alternating years). The President oversees the running of the ICGA, including attracting members, oversight of the ICGA Journal, and ensuring that the ICGA is financially responsible.

If you want more information on this opportunity, please contact Jonathan Schaeffer.

5. ICGA Treasurer Opportunity

After many, many years as ICGA Treasurer, Hiroyuki Iida would like to step down. The ICGA is a small organization and so the volume of transactions is not large. Further we have a part-time assistant who takes care of the day-to-day activities.

If you want more information on this opportunity, please contact Hiroyuki Iida.

6. ICGA Journal

As always we are looking for interesting articles for the ICGA Journal. Perhaps you’ve has some success with new ideas in your game playing program? Tell our readership about it! Don’t be intimidated by an academic journal. You may not be an experienced paper writer but we can help you. The ideas come first. The presentation is the easy part.

The Advances in Computer Games conference will be held online November 28-30. The call for papers can be found here. We want to hear about your exciting, innovative work in game AI!

The Computer Olympiad will be held at the end of August through to early September. More details coming soon. Start preparing/tuning your program. Why resist the chance to become a World Champion?

We are still working on setting up the World Computer Chess Championships. Hopefully we will have exciting news soon. Don’t wait for the announcement; time to accelerate your plans for improving the program’s strength.

Our biennial Computers and Games conference is November 22-24. Registration is free (information is here). The conference is online and features four keynote talks and 15 research papers. The keynote speakers are:

• Murray Campbell (IBM TJ Watson)
• Matt Ginsberg (Google X)
• Olivier Teytaud (Meta AI Research)
• Tao Qin (Microsoft Research)

Join us for three days of research, education, and fun as we explore advancing the state of the art in AI applied to games.

The 2022 Computer Olympiad featured 18 games with 53 competitors. Thank you to all the participants for a successful event. The final results can be found here. Start planning for our 2023 Olympiad!