Computers and Games Second International Conference, CG 2001, Hamamatsu, Japan, October 26-28, 2000 Revised Papers

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Conference on Computers and Games, CG 2001, held in Hamamatsu, Japan in October 2000. The 23 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions and five reviews were carefully refereed and selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on search and strategies, learning and pattern acquisition, theory and complexity issues, and further experiments on game; the reviews presented are on computer language games, computer Go, intelligent agents for computer games, RoboCup, and computer Shogi.

Search and Strategies.- A Least-Certainty Heuristic for Selective Search.- Lambda-Search in Game Trees — with Application to Go.- Abstract Proof Search.- Solving Kriegspiel-Like Problems: Examining Efficient Search Methods.- Strategies for the Automatic Construction of Opening Books.- Awari Retrograde Analysis.- Construction of Chinese Chess Endgame Databases by Retrograde Analysis.- Learning and Pattern Acquisition.- Learning from Perfection.- Chess Neighborhoods, Function Combination, and Reinforcement Learning.- Learning a Go Heuristic with Tilde.- Learning Time Allocation Using Neural Networks.- Theory and Complexity Issues.- The Complexity of Graph Ramsey Games.- Virus Versus Mankind.- Creating Difficult Instances of the Post Correspondence Problem.- Integer Programming Based Algorithms for Peg Solitaire Problems.- Ladders Are PSPACE-Complete.- Simple Amazons Endgames and Their Connection to Hamilton Circuits in Cubic Subgrid Graphs.- Further Experiments with Games.- New Self-Play Results in Computer Chess.- SUPER-SOMA — Solving Tactical Exchanges in Shogi without Tree Searching.- A Shogi Processor with a Field Programmable Gate Array.- Plausible Move Generation Using Move Merit Analysis with Cut-Off Thresholds in Shogi.- Abstraction Methods for Game Theoretic Poker.- Reasoning by Agents in Computer Bridge Bidding.- Invited Talks and Reviews.- Linguistic Geometry for Solving War Games.- Physics and Ecology of Rock-Paper-Scissors Game.- Review: Computer Language Games.- Review: Computer Go 1984–2000.- Review: Intelligent Agents for Computer Games.- Review: RoboCup through 2000.- Review: Computer Shogi through 2000.