TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents.................................................................................................................................................................. 65

From Maastricht to Tilburg (H.J. van den Herik) ............................................................................................................. 65

New Addresses (H.J. van den Herik) ................................................................................................................................. 66

Monte-Carlo Go with Knowledge-Guided Simulations (Keh-Hsun Chen and Peigang Zhang) ............................... 67

Retrograde Approximation Algorithms for Jeopardy Stochastic Games ...................................................................

(Haw-ren Fang, James Glenn, and Clyde P. Kruskal) ...................................................................................... 77

Theme Detection and Evaluation in Chess (Azlan Iqbal and Mashkuri Yaacob)........................................................ 97

Note: ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 110

Solving Connect-4 on Medium Board Sizes (John Tromp)........................................................................... 110

Information for Contributors.............................................................................................................................................. 113

News, Information, Tournaments, and Reports: ............................................................................................................ 114

The 5^th Arimaa Computer World Championship (Omar Syed)...................................................................... 114

The 5^th Arimaa Challenge Match (Omar Syed)................................................................................................ 116

Open French Computer Championship Rapid Polish Draughts 2008 (Ton Tillemans)............................. 117

The 1^st Computer-Chess Championship of CIS Countries (Alex Morozov)................................................ 119

The 18^th CSA World Computer-Shogi Championship (Reijer Grimbergen)................................................. 121

Calendar of Computer-Games Events in 2008.................................................................................................. 125

ICGA Candidates for the Triennial Meeting (The Board of ICGA).............................................................. 125

IA-Go Challenge MoGo vs. Catalin Taranu (Guillaume Chaslot)……........................................................ 126

The Swedish Rating List (T. Karlsson)............................................................................................................ 127

How the ICGA Journal Reaches You................................................................................................................................ 128

From Maastricht to Tilburg

As per September 1, 2008 the ICGA Headquarters are moving from Maastricht, the Netherlands to Tilburg, the Netherlands. After 21 years of services to the Maastricht University your Editor has accepted an offer by the Tilburg University that he could not refuse. Together with his close colleague Professor Eric Postma he moves to Tilburg, where he is given the opportunity to lead a brand-new research centre called Tilburg Centre for Creative Computing (TiCC). The research centre will have five full professors, sufficient research money, and the full support of the Tilburg University authorities. The centre will focus on three domains: vision (led by Eric Postma), language (led by Antal van den Bosch), and (serious) gaming (led by Jaap van den Herik, who also acts as Director of the Centre). Many colleague researchers/collaborators from Maastricht will join the new research group at TiCC. Most notably among them is Johanna Hellemons who will continue her work as Editorial Manager in Tilburg.

The news was a shock for Maastricht, Limburg, and the Netherlands. Every respected daily newspaper reported on the transition by Van den Herik and Postma. Here, the most crispy statement came from the Chairman of the VSNU (Verenigde Samenwerkende Nederlandse Universiteiten; the Union of the Collaborative Dutch Universities), Dr. Sijbold Noorda, who straightforwardly expressed his understanding by stating: “Mobility shows spirit”.

Admittedly, a move from Maastricht to Tilburg implies a farewell to some well-known names. Many of them will not escape the scope of our community, but one name does: Tons van den Bosch. Long-time members of the ICGA (previously ICCA) will remember her from the many activities she performed in the years 1990 up to 1997 (see ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 70). In 2005, she returned at our institute MICC-IKAT and took up some of her responsibilities for the ICGA. It was if she had never left.

In 2007, Tons van den Bosch and Johanna Hellemons were both instrumental to the success of our ICGA President David Levy. During his public defence for the Doctor’s title they were his paranimfs. Soon after this defence Tons became seriously ill. Currently she is in a phase of strengthening her forces, but she is not expected to resume work soon. The ICGA is grateful to her for all the services delivered and for her enthusiasm to help transforming the members of the ICGA into a society of friends who love research in games and game environments, and who love to meet each other once a year at the Computer Olympiad, the Computer and Games Conference, and at the World Computer-Chess Championship.

This year, the meeting of friends will be in Beijing, China. It will be soon (September/October 2008) as is announced in the March issue. The subscription figures at this point in time show that the three ICGA events in Beijing are expected to be the most successful ones of all. Over one hundred people are participating. The world of games will have a golden time in Beijing and the ICGA hopes to reap the fruits from these successful events.

Meanwhile the Editorial team has the pleasure to offer you the June issue of the Journal. Three games received a great deal of attention: Go, Jeopardy Stochastic Games, and Chess. Obviously, nowadays there is no Go publication possible without Monte Carlo. The authors adequately go along with this statement. The second article deals with an interesting generalisation of Can’t Stop, namely Jeopardy Stochastic Games. It can be seen as a completely new area of games research. Analogously, the article on chess is actually on ‘chess and measuring its beauty’. It is not on new chess programming techniques. Finally, it is worthwhile to mention that the proceedings of the CG 2008 are currently with Springer-Verlag. They will be delivered in time – we hope – in China for our Conference, where we will see 24 contributors gathering; they will inform us on their latest findings. Therefore, I hope to see many of you soon in China.

Jaap van den Herik

New Addresses

As per September 1, 2008 the following new addresses are relevant for communication with the ICGA and their officers.

Editor-in-Chief: Professor H.Jaap van den Herik

Editorial Manager: Johanna Hellemons

Postal address: Visiting address:

Tilburg University Warandelaan 2, 5037 AB, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Faculty of Humanities Dante Building, room D 345

P.O. Box 90153 Tel. no.: + 31 (0)13 466 2158

5000 LE Tilburg Secr. no. +31 (0) 13 466 8118 

The Netherlands

email: info@icga.org or H.J.vdnHerik@uvt.nl or J.W.Hellemons@uvt.nl

Tons van den Bosch with one of her dogs. Chinese Wall.

The credits of the photographs in this issue are to: Mr. R. van ’t Riet (p. 66), www.GreatWallBeijing.com (p. 66), Mr. T. Tillemans (p. 118), Mr. A. Morozov (p. 120), and Mr. G. Chaslot (p. 126).