[PlanetKR] General Game Playing Workshop at IJCAI-09

[Michael Thielscher]

               The IJCAI-09 Workshop on General Game Playing 
           General Intelligence in Game-Playing Agents (GIGA'09)
                           Pasadena, CA, USA 
                        http://www.ru.is/GIGA09


GENERAL INFORMATION

Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have for decades worked on building 
game-playing agents capable of matching wits with the strongest humans in the 
world, resulting in several success stories for games like e.g. chess and 
checkers. The success of such systems has been for a part due to years of 
relentless knowledge-engineering effort on behalf of the program developers, 
manually adding application-dependent knowledge to their game-playing agents. 
Also, the various algorithmic enhancements used are often highly tailored 
towards the game at hand.

Research into general game playing (GGP) aims at taking this approach to the 
next level: to build intelligent software agents that can, given the rules of 
any game, automatically learn a strategy for playing that game at an expert 
level without any human intervention. On contrary to software systems 
designed to play one specific game, systems capable of playing arbitrary 
unseen games cannot be provided with game-specific domain knowledge a priory. 
Instead they must be endowed with high-level abilities to learn strategies 
and make abstract reasoning. Successful realization of this poses many 
interesting research challenges for a wide variety of artificial-intelligence 
sub-areas including (but not limited to):

 - knowledge representation, 
 - reasoning, 
 - heuristic search, 
 - automated planning, 
 - computational game-theory, 
 - multi-agent systems, 
 - machine learning. 

The aim of this workshop is bring together researchers from the above 
sub-fields of AI to discuss how best to address the challenges of and further 
advance the state-of-the-art of general game-playing systems and generic 
artificial intelligence.


INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

The workshop papers should be submitted online (see workshop webpage). 
Submitted papers must adhere to the IJCAI paper-formatting guidelines and not 
exceed 8 pages. The papers must present original work that has not been 
published elsewhere. However, submissions of papers that are under review 
elsewhere are allowed, in particular we welcome papers submitted to the main 
technical track of IJCAI.  All papers will be peer reviewed and non-archival 
working notes produced containing the papers presented at the workshop.

Important dates:

 - Paper submission: March 6th, 2009 
 - Acceptance notification: April 17th, 2009 
 - Camera-ready papers due: May 8th, 2009
 - Workshop date:  July 11-13, 2009 (exact date TBA)

If you are interesting in attending the conference without submitting a paper 
please send a short statement of interest to one of the contact organizers 
listed below before April 17th.


WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION 

Organizers:
 - Yngvi Björnsson, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University
 - Peter Stone, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin
 - Michael Thielscher, Department of Computer Science, Dresden University of 
Technology

Program committee:
 - Yngvi Björnsson, Reykjavik University 
 - Patrick Doherty, Linköping University 
 - Michael Genesereth, Stanford University 
 - Jonathan Schaeffer, University of Alberta 
 - Peter Stone, University of Texas, Austin
 - Michael Thielscher, Dresden University of Technology
 - Jaap van den Herik, Tilburg University 
 - Michael Wooldridge, University of Liverpool 

Contacts:
 - Yngvi Björnsson, email: yngvi at ru.is
 - Michael Thielscher, email: mit at inf.tu-dresden.de