ICGA

The 2021 Computer Olympiad will be held the last two weeks of August. It’s time to start debugging, tuning your code, reading the latest research advances, adding new ideas to your program, and preparing to go for the gold!

The 2020 Computer Olympiad is over. We had 72 entries competing in 21 tournaments. The final results are here. Thank you to all the competitors for participating. Thank you for Hiroyuki Iida and I-Chen Wu for their organizational efforts.

There were over 70 entries to the Olympiad, resulting in 21 tournaments. Follow the competition results here. Best wishes to all the competitors for an exciting and fun competition.

This year, for the first time, the Computer Olympiad is online. There has been lots of interest in the event. If you have not registered to compete, please do so as soon as possible (it helps with the planning).
Thank you — and good luck!

Registration for the Computer Olympiad is now open! Help make our online competition a success by entering your state-of-the-art program, or dusting off your code from a few years ago to see how it fares against the new generation of programs.

Early registrations are appreciated as it allows us to better plan for the event.

We look forward to a successful competition, and the practical demonstration of new ideas in artificial intelligence.

The Computer Olympiad 2020 page is regularly being updated. Please go there to see which completions are likely to be happen. Registration will open shortly.

Thank you for your patience regarding ICGA events for 2020. The pandemic has played havoc with our plans for our annual events, which were to be held in Spain in June. Since then we have been scrambling for solutions.

1. Computers and Games conference 2020 — cancelled. This was previously announced.
2. NEW: World Computer Chess Championships 2020 — cancelled. This was a difficult decision, but the logistics to move these events online in a timely way were challenging.

Hopefully both events will be held in 2021.

3. NEW: Computer Olympiad. I am delighted to announce that the Computer Olympiad will be held online during November-December 2020. Please see the ICGA site (under the drop-down menu Computer Olympiad) for the details.

The best way you can support the ICGA is to enter a program into one of the Olympiad competitions (or encourage your friends to enter a program). And if your favorite game has not been in the Olympiad recently, let us know and we would be happy to add it to this year’s list of competitions.

Any questions? Send me email: jonathan@ualberta.ca

Originally, the ICGA events — Computers and Games conference, Computer Olympiad, World Computer Chess Championships — were to be held in Spain this week. The pandemic caused the conference to move to the beginning of September and then move online. The ICGA has been working to find good solutions for hosting our events.

We hope to return to normal for our 2021 events, but for this year the following decisions have been made:

Conference: There will be no conference this year. For those of you who were hoping to publish in this year’s Computers and Games conference, please consider submitting to the ICGA Journal.

Computer Olympiad: This year’s Olympiad will be online. We will be using a platform built on Ludii. Ludii has been designed to support a wide variety of games, and we expect it will support all of the Olympiad games. The networked version of the software is being tested and we will do test tournaments this summer. The target is for an Olympiad in October. More details will be coming in July.
Thank you to the Ludii team for their hard work to make the Olympiad possible.

Computer Chess Championships: We are working towards having one or more chess events online later this year (November, possibly December).


An important strength of the ICGA community is that we get together once a year to exchange research ideas and test our programs. The person-to-person communication and connections that are made at these events are an important part of building and sustaining our community. I sincerely hope we will see each other in 2021.

Take care.

Jonathan Schaeffer
President, ICGA

The European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) have moved their annual meeting from early June to August 29 to September 2. This is in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. ECAI will still be held in the beautiful town of Santiago de Compostela.
As ECAI is kindly hosting the ICGA events for 2020 (World Computer Chess Championship; Computer Olympiad; Computers and Games conference), we are also changing dates.
My sincere apologies for the challenges this will cause some of you. The move is in all our best interests. These are difficult days, and it is prudent to be cautious.

Thank you for your understanding. I hope to see you in Spain at the end of August.

ICGA President Jonathan Schaeffer

The information about the Computers and Games 2020 conference can be found here: https://icga.org/?page_id=3086. Or in the many under Conferences.