ICGA - Chess Programming Wiki

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The ICGA, the International Computer Games Association, was founded as the ICCA in 1977 by computer chess programmers to organize championship events for computer programs and to facilitate the sharing of technical knowledge via the ICGA Journal.

Contents

The Aims of the ICGA are

to publish a quarterly ICGA Journal ¹

to hold regular World Computer-Chess Championships, Computer Olympiads, and Advances in Computer Games conferences
to strengthen ties and to promote cooperation between computer-game researchers
to introduce computer games to the games world
to support national computer-games organizations and computer-games tournament organizers

The Board of the ICGA

President: Jonathan Schaeffer ²
Vice-President: Ryan Hayward
Vice-President Asian Countries: Shun-Chin Hsu
Secretary-Treasurer: Hiroyuki Iida
Programmers Representative: Mark Lefler

ICCA / ICGA Presidents

President	Org.	from	until
Ben Mittman	ICCA	1977	1983
Monroe Newborn		1983	1986
David Levy		1986	1992
Tony Marsland		1992	1999
David Levy	ICCA	1999	2002
David Levy	ICGA	2002	2019
Jonathan Schaeffer		2019

ICGA Events

Tournament Rules

World Microcomputer Chess Championship until 2001

Investigations

ICGA Investigations

ICGA Topics

ICGA: Chess Endgames compiled by Guy Haworth and colleagues » Endgame Tablebases
ICGA: Lines of Action by Mark Winands » Lines of Action
ICGA: Losing Chess by Guy Haworth
ICGA: Roshambo by Guy Haworth

History and Purpose of the ICGA

Renamed into the ICGA in 2002 ⁴ , the association now more broadly fosters the Computer Games community through its relationships with Computer Science, Commercial and Game organizations throughout the world. The ICGA's broader scope reflects the more general way in which computer-game capability contributes to Artificial Intelligence and to the human experience of game-playing.

Quotes

Robert Hyatt

Robert Hyatt, 1997 in a rgcc post ⁵ :

I was there when Barend Swets (Believe the spelling is correct) proposed forming this organization in 1977 in Toronto. I was one of many that stood up and said "yes, I'll join." However, others stood up and said I'll not only join, I'll help for nothing, and the ICCA was formed, and continues to work this way.

Jaap van den Herik

Jaap van den Herik in 2001 in The Bell Captain ⁶ :

In 1977, the ICCA was founded during the Second World Computer-Chess Championship in Toronto. The organisation was the brainchild of Barend Swets and many participants supported the idea, among them Ken Thompson who then tied for 4th place amongst 16 participants with his program BELLE. CHESS 4.6 won the title but Ken received credit for BELLE's KQKR endgame play against IGM Walter Browne (Fenner, 1979) ⁷ ⁸ . Further, Ken agreed to serve as Secretary and Treasurer of the new organisation alongside Ben Mittman, the first ICCA President, and did so successfully and with much enthusiasm for six years.

Best-Publication Awards

Mephisto Best-Publication Award

Winners of the Mephisto Best-Publication Award by Hegener & Glaser, 1988-1992:

Thomas Anantharaman, Murray Campbell, Feng-hsiung Hsu (1988). Singular extensions: Adding Selectivity to Brute-Force Searching. AAAI Spring Symposium, Computer Game Playing, also published in ICCA Journal, Vol. 11, No. 4, republished (1990) in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 99-109
Don Beal (Editor) (1989). Advances in Computer Chess 5.
Feng-hsiung Hsu (1990). Large Scale Parallelization of Alpha-Beta Search: An Algorithmic and Architectural Study with Computer Chess. Ph.D. thesis, Technical report CMU-CS-90-108, Carnegie Mellon University
Tony Scherzer, Linda Scherzer, Dean Tjaden (1990). Learning in Bebe. Computers, Chess, and Cognition » Bebe
Thomas Anantharaman (1991). Extension Heuristics. ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2
Jos Uiterwijk (1992). The Countermove Heuristic. ICCA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1

Novag Best-Publication Award

Winners of the Novag Best-Publication Award, 1992-1996:

Ken Thompson (1992). Chess Endgames Vol. 3. CD-ROM, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Rainer Feldmann (1993). Game Tree Search on Massively Parallel Systems. Ph.D. thesis, pdf
Aske Plaat, Jonathan Schaeffer, Wim Pijls, Arie de Bruin (1994, 2014). A New Paradigm for Minimax Search. TR-CS 94-18, University of Alberta, arXiv:1404.1515
Robert Hyatt (1995-1996). The Chess Program Crafty, especially by making it available to anyone who wants it

ChessBase Best-Publication Award

Winners of the ChessBase Best-Publication Award 1999-2010:

Ernst Heinz (1999). Scalable Search in Computer Chess.
Eugene Nalimov (2000). Endgame Tablebases
John Romein (2001). Multigame - An Environment for Distributed Game-Tree Search. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit, supervisor Henri Bal, pdf
Brian Sheppard (2002). Towards Perfect Play of Scrabble. Ph.D. thesis, Maastricht University, pdf
Jeroen Donkers (2003). Nosce Hostem - Searching with Opponent Models. Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit Maastricht, [http://www.fdg.unimaas.nl/educ/donkers/pubs/..%5Cpdf%5Cnoscehostem.pdf pdf]
Mark Winands (2004). Informed Search in Complex Games. Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit Maastricht, pdf
Akihiro Kishimoto (2005). Correct and Efficient Search Algorithms in the Presence of Repetitions. Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta, pdf
Darse Billings (2006). Algorithms and Assessment in Computer Poker. Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta
Jonathan Schaeffer, Neil Burch, Yngvi Björnsson, Akihiro Kishimoto, Martin Müller, Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Steve Sutphen (2007). Checkers is Solved. Science, Vol. 317, no. 5844

Jonathan Schaeffer, Yngvi Björnsson, Neil Burch, Akihiro Kishimoto, Martin Müller, Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Steve Sutphen (2005). Solving Checkers. IJCAI 2005, pdf

Guillaume Chaslot, Mark Winands, Jos Uiterwijk, Jaap van den Herik, Bruno Bouzy (2008). Progressive Strategies for Monte-Carlo Tree Search. New Mathematics and Natural Computation, Vol. 4, No. 3
Olivier Teytaud, Jean-Yves Audibert, Guillaume Chaslot, Louis Chatriot, Christophe Fiter, Sylvain Gelly, Rémi Munos, Jean-Baptiste Hoock, Julien Pérez, Arpad Rimmel, Yizao Wang, Thomas Hérault, Vincent Danjean (2009). MoGo that won: one 19x19 Go game with 6-stone handicap vs a professional player, one 19x19 Go game with 7-stone handicap vs a professional player, one 9x9 Go game as Black vs a professional player.
Shih-Chieh Huang, Rémi Coulom (2010). Erica, the Go Program that won the Go 2010 Computer Olympiad.

Best-Publication Award

Winners of the Best-Publication Award 2011 ...

Sylvain Gelly, David Silver (2011). Monte-Carlo tree search and rapid action value estimation in computer Go. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 175, No. 11
Yoji Ojima, Hideki Kato (2012). Go progam Zen, that beat a 9 dan professional player (Takemiya Masaki) in a 19x19 Go game with 4 stones of handicap on March 17, 2012.
Abdallah Saffidine (2013). Solving Games and All That. Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris-Dauphine, advisor Tristan Cazenave, pdf
Gerd Isenberg, Mark Lefler (2014). The Chess Programming Wiki.. (Thank you)

ICGA Journal Awards

In 1992, a novel Award was instituted by the ICCA, the ICCA Journal Award. The Award is to be adjudicated annually to a first-time author for the best article in the ICCA/ICGA Journal in the year under consideration.

Year	Award Winner	Article	Published in
1993	Peter Jansen	Peter Jansen (1993). KQKR: Speculatively Thwarting a Human Opponent.	Vol. 16, No. 1
1994	Chrilly Donninger	Chrilly Donninger (1993). Null Move and Deep Search: Selective-Search Heuristics for Obtuse Chess Programs.	Vol. 16, No. 3
1995	Bradley Kuszmaul	Bradley Kuszmaul (1995). The StarTech Massively Parallel Chess Program.	Vol. 18, No. 1
1996	Michael Buro	Michael Buro (1995). ProbCut: An Effective Selective Extension of the Alpha-Beta Algorithm.	Vol. 18, No. 2
1997	Mark Brockington	Mark Brockington (1996). A Taxonomy of Parallel Game-Tree Search Algorithms.	Vol. 19, No. 3
1998	Andreas Junghanns	Andreas Junghanns (1998). Are there Practical Alternatives to Alpha-Beta?	Vol. 21, No. 1
1999	Ernst A. Heinz	Ernst Heinz (1998). Efficient Interior-Node Recognition.	Vol. 21, No. 3
2000	Darse Billings	Darse Billings (2000). Thoughts on RoShamBo.	Vol. 23, No. 1
2001	Thomas Thomsen	Thomas Thomsen (2000). Lambda-Search in Game Trees with Application to Go.	Vol. 23, No. 4
2002	Ren Wu	Ren Wu, Don Beal (2001). Fast, Memory-efficient Retrograde Algorithms.	Vol. 24, No. 3
2003	David Fotland	David Fotland (2002). Static Eye in "The Many Faces of Go".	Vol. 25, No. 4
2004	Haw-ren Fang	Haw-ren Fang, Tsan-sheng Hsu, Shun-Chin Hsu (2004). Checking Indefinitely in Chinese-Chess Endgames.	Vol. 27, No. 1
2005	Kohei Noshita	Kohei Noshita (2005). Union-Connections and Straightforward Winning Strategies in Hex. + Companion pdf	Vol. 28, No. 1
2006	Fridel Fainshtein	Fridel Fainshtein, Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner (2006). A Chess Composer of Two-Move Mate Problems.	Vol. 29, No. 1
2007	Gian Piero Favini	Paolo Ciancarini, Gian Piero Favini (2007). A Program to Play Kriegspiel.	Vol. 30, No. 1
2008	Rémi Coulom	Rémi Coulom (2007). Computing “Elo Ratings” of Move Patterns in the Game of Go.	Vol. 30, No. 4
2009	Nathan Sturtevant	Nathan Sturtevant (2008). An Analysis of UCT in Multi-Player Games.	Vol. 31, No. 1
2010	Yoshikuni Sato	Yoshikuni Sato, Daisuke Takahashi, Reijer Grimbergen (2010). A Shogi Program based on Monte-Carlo Tree Search.	Vol. 33, No. 2
2011	Petr Baudiš	Petr Baudiš (2011). Balancing MCTS by Dynamically Adjusting the Komi Value.	Vol. 34, No. 3
2012	Diogo R. Ferreira	Diogo R. Ferreira (2012). Determining the Strength of Chess Players Based on Actual Play.	Vol. 35, No. 1
2013	Kunihito Hoki	Kunihito Hoki, Tomoyuki Kaneko, Akihiro Kishimoto, Takeshi Ito (2013). Parallel Dovetailing and its Application to Depth-First Proof-Number Search.	Vol. 36, No. 1

Forum Posts

ICGA Olympiad 2013: Yokohama, Aug 12-18! by Harm Geert Muller, CCC, December 21, 2012 ⁹
ICGA Computer Olympiad 2013: Yokohama, Aug 12-18 by Harm Geert Muller, Rybka Forum, December 21, 2012
WCCC 2015 Leiden by Stefano Gemma, CCC, January 14, 2015
ICGA Facebook page by Harvey Williamson, CCC, July 06, 2017
Would the ICGA have accepted today's NNUE engines? by Madeleine Birchfield, CCC, July 05, 2021 » NNUE
ICGA WCCC and WCSC in Santiago de Compostela CCC, March 06, 2024

External Links

References

Up one level

ICGA Reference Database ↩︎
A NEW PRESIDENT - Announcement by David Levy by Mark Lefler, December 11, 2018↩︎
ICGA Tournament Database ↩︎
ICCA BECOMES ICGA by David Levy, President of the ICGA, ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3 - September 2002↩︎
Does ICCA publish dissenting views?, post #18 by Robert Hyatt, January 22, 1997, rgcc ↩︎
Jaap van den Herik (2001). The Bell Captain. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 ↩︎
Walter Shawn Browne vs Belle (Computer) - Queen vs Rook exhibition 1978fromchessgames.com↩︎
QUEEN vs. ROOKbyWarren Stenbergand Edware J. Conway, reprinted from the January, 1979 issue of the Minnesota Chess Journal, The Usenet Oldnews Archive, Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman »ACM 1978, Belle, Endgame Tablebases, Walter Browne↩︎
Yokohama 2013 (ICGA Tournaments)↩︎
ICGA Facebook page by Harvey Williamson, CCC, July 06, 2017↩︎