This book contains the papers of the 7th Computer and Games Conference
(CG 2010) held in Kanazawa, Japan. The conference took place during
September 24–26, 2010 in conjunction with the 15th Computer Olympiad and
the 17th World Computer Chess Championship.
The Computer and Games conference series is a major international forum
for researchers and developers interested in all aspects of artificial intelligence
and computer game playing. The contributions to the Kanazawa conference
showed considerable progress in the development and implementation of new
ideas. Without any doubt, the quality of the papers of this conference coincides
with the increase of playing strength as appeared in many games. Earlier
conferences took place in Tsukuba, Japan (1998), Hamamatsu, Japan (2000),
Edmonton, Canada (2002), Ramat-Gan, Israel (2004), Turin, Italy (2006), and
Beijing, China (2008).
The Program Committee (PC) was pleased to see that many submissions focused
on the development of new ideas and tools to increase the playing strength.
The ideas that supported this aim led to high-quality papers (e.g., for Go, Hex,
and Connect6). Each paper was sent to three referees. If conflicting views on a
paper were reported, the referees themselves arrived at a proper decision for the
papers. With the help of many referees (see after the preface), the PC accepted
24 papers for presentation at the conference and publication in these proceedings.
The above-mentioned set of 24 papers covers a wide range of topics and
a wide range of computer games. For the topics, we mention: Monte-Carlo
Tree Search, Proof-Number Search, UCT Algorithm, Scalability, Parallelization,
Opening Books, Knowledge Abstraction, Solving Games, Consultation of Players,
Multi-Player Games, Extraversion, and Combinatorial Game Theory.
The number of games is also large owing to the fact that some papers discussed
more than one game. In total 15 different games are dealt with. Twelve
of them are played in practice by human players, namely, Chinese Checkers,
Chinese Chess, Connect6, Go 9x9, Go 13x13, and Go 19x19, Havannah, Lines
of Action, Pickomino, Shogi, Surakarta, and Yahtzee. Moreover, there are specialties,
such as a computer puzzle with human assessment, Maze Design; two
theoretical games, Synchronized Domineering and Focus; and one video game.
Next to these games the topic of Multi-Player Game is investigated.