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In the game of chess the notion of beginner has three meanings. In this contribution they are used as a framework for the history of computer chess. The natural line of reasoning will then bring us to main question: Will the game of Chess (soon) be Solved? A positive answer will certainly be seen as a stepping stone for the next question: Can a computer play perfect chess? Of course, this question will have a natural follow-up in the form of an even more challenging question: Is perfect thinking by a computer possible? The audacious answer "yes" will lead to the world-wide prevailing question of all current AI scientists: Will our intelligence be replaced by AI? The article finds its way (not discussed by us) via machine learning and autonomous adaptation to deep learning and thereafter via Explainable AI and Interpretable AI to solving the Game of Chess. Cornerstones of this historical development will be given in the next three articles by Richard Pijl, Dap Hartmann and Jon Edwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of higher education shows a jumble of alliances between fellow institutes. The alliances are strategic in kind and serve an economy-of-scales concept. A large scale is a prerequisite for allocating the budgets for new educational methods and technologies in order to keep the educational services up-to-date. All too often, however, strategic alliances remain no more than dead letters, feted by boards of management, but lacking innovative power. The current paper reviews the K-Web case, one of few successful strategic alliances in education in the Netherlands. The K-Web alliance started in 1997 and aimed at a joint development of digitized learning materials in the domain of knowledge engineering. At its start five universities in the Netherlands were involved; in 2002 more universities joined the alliance. Based on the K-Web case, this paper identifies and explains the critical factors for successful co-operation and proposes a number of guidelines for making strategic alliances work. The guidelines involve issues on governance, project management, the partners' autonomies, conflicting pedagogies and conflicting technologies. The K-Web strategy seems to indicate a passable route, which may be helpful for other alliances.

. Using crowdsourcing for solving disputes is a subject that has not been discussed in many scientific publications. However, since Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution (CODR) provides a cheap, fast, and democratic dispute resolution, it has a potential that needs to be explored scientifically. How should eBay solve otherwise 60 millions disputes per year? Building a CODR platform with the convenience and attractiveness of other collective intelligence systems, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google, may cause many variants of traditional forms of dispute resolution fading away. In order to shed more light on CODR, the present contribution defines this new type of dispute resolution, describes the present state of play, and builds a theoretical framework by investigating CODR building blocks. Although the paper provides only the start of a profound discussion, it shows introductory explorations of the key theoretical issues involved in CODR., 1. Introduction Ever since the creation of Google, there has been a steady increase in the number of websites using 'the wisdom of the crowd'. Wikipedia and the Amazon's Mechanical [...]

The article offers information on the ninth World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) started on August 11, 2019. Topics include, six programs participated in a double round robin tournament of ten rounds; tournament took place at the Venetian Macau Hotel Resort in Macau, China and was organized by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19) who was also main sponsor; and winning combination in the tournament.

The article offers information on the 25th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) started on August 13, 2019. Topics include, six programs participated in a double round robin tournament of ten rounds; the venue was part of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19) who acted also as the main sponsor; and every chess player understands that White is the winning side.

The article offers information on the WSCC 2019 (World Speed Chess Championship) which was held on the 12th and 15th August, 2019 at the Venetian Macau Hotel Resort in Macau, China. Topics include, chess event was part of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19) which also acted as the main sponsor; other important sponsor was Digital Game Technology (DGT) who provided the electronic chessboards; and winning of Johannes Zwanzger.

Reactive agents are generally believed to be incapable of coping with perceptual ambiguity (i.e., identical sensory states that require different responses). However, a recent finding suggests that reactive agents can […]

The article focuses on the 8th World Chess Software Championship (WCSC) 2018 which was held on July 14th-15th at the Stockholmsmässan in Stockholm. The championship was organised by International Computer Games Association (ICGA) and sponsored by Digital Game Technology (DGT). The computer chess software tournament was played between nine chess engines using the computer software in nine different rounds. The commentary on the tournament was made by International Grand Master Harry Schussler.

The article focuses on the World Speed Computer Chess Championship (WSCC) 2018 which was held on July 13th at the Stockholmsmässan in Stockholm. The championship was organised by International Computer Games Association (ICGA) and sponsored by Digital Game Technology (DGT). The computer chess tournament was played between five outs of eight chess players using the WCCC hardware in five different rounds. The numbers of games per round and rules was discussed during the player meeting.

The article focuses on the 24th World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) 2018 which was held on July 16 at the Stockholmsmässan in Stockholm. The championship was organised by International Computer Games Association (ICGA) and sponsored by Digital Game Technology (DGT). The computer chess tournament was played between eight programs using the computer software in eight different rounds. The commentary on the tournament was made by chess grandmasters Vlastimil Hort and Harry Schussler.

The International Computer Games Association Journal published an article titled "The future of chess." The article discusses the connection between Correspondence Chess and Computer Chess, which were brought together at the ICCF Congress 2023 in Amsterdam. The congress focused on honoring the new Correspondence Chess World Champion, Jon Edwards, and discussing the future of chess. Keynote speakers addressed topics such as the development of computers, the playing strength at the World Computer Chess Championship, and the connection between Computer Chess and Correspondence Chess. The article also raises the question of whether it is possible to solve the game of chess. [Extracted from the article]

The article discussses the 23rd World Computer Chess Championship tournament at Leiden University in the Netherlands on July 3, 2017. Organizers of the event include the International Computer Games Association (ICGA), the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), and the Lieden Centre of Data Science (LCDS). An overview of the performance of the participating programs from authors by Johannes Zwanzger, Don Dailey and Stefan Meyer-Kahlen is also presented.

The article highlights the 6th World Chess Software Championship at the Leiden University in the Netherlands on July 2, 2016. Topics mentioned include the event organizers, such as the International Computer Games Association and the Leiden Centre of Data Science, the game's contestants, including Mark Lefler, Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, and Richard Pijl, the victory of the Komodo program by Don Dailey, Larry Kaufman and Lefler, as well as the performance of all programs in various rounds of the game.

The article discusses the 22nd World Computer Chess Championship, held at the Leiden University in Leiden, Netherlands on June 27, 2016. It highlights the understanding between the human and computer in playing chess computer games. It also cites the exchange of bishop between the black and the white in chess games.

Gameplay is commonly considered to be a voluntary activity. Game designers generally believe that voluntary gameplay is essentially different from mandatory gameplay. Such a belief may be a challenge for serious games, as instruction is usually mandatory. The article describes the outcomes of two experiments on the impact of voluntariness on the learning effect and enjoyment of a serious game. In the first experiment freedom of choosing to play a serious game was studied, with participants who had volunteered to participate. The results suggested that, contrary to the opinion of many game designers, being required to play a serious game does not automatically take the fun out of the game. The second experiment had voluntary participants and mandatory participants, who had to participate as part of a homework assignment. The outcomes show that mandatory participants enjoyed the game as much as the voluntary participants, even if they had to play the game for a minimum required time. These studies indicate that mandatory gameplay does not reduce enjoyment and learning effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, video games have come to appeal to people of all ages. The effect of age on how people play games is not fully understood. In this paper, we delve into the question how age relates to an individual's play style. “Play style” is defined as any (set of) patterns in game actions performed by a player. Based on data from 10 416 Battlefield 3 players, we found that age strongly correlates to how people start out playing a game (initial play style), and to how they change their play style over time (play style development). Our data shows three major trends: 1) correlations between age and initial play style peak around the age of 20; 2) performance decreases with age; and 3) speed of play decreases with age. The relationship between age and play style may be explained by the neurocognitive effects of aging: as people grow older, their cognitive performance decays, their personalities shift to a more conscientious style, and their gaming motivations become less achievement-oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article highlights the 2016 World Speed Computer Chess Championship (WSCC) of the International Computer Games Association (ICGA). Topics mentioned include the nature of the game which pertains to the merits of good static evaluation by the engines and the reliability and hand speed from the operators, progress of the game round by round, and the availability of the game online.

The saccadic selection of relevant visual input for preferential processing allows the efficient use of computational resources. Based on saccadic active human vision, we aim to develop a plausible saccade-based visual cognitive system for a humanoid robot. This paper presents two initial steps toward our objective by extending the saccade-based model of human memory called NIM1 to a plausible model of natural visual classification. NIM builds feature-vector representations from selected local image samples and uses these to make memory-based decisions. As a first step, we adapt NIM to a straightforward saccade-based model for the classification of natural visual input called NIM-CLASS and evaluate the model in a face-classification experiment. As a second step, we aim to approach the interactive nature of human vision by extending NIM-CLASS to NIM-CLASSTD by adding active top-down saccadic control. We then assess to what extent top-down control enhances classification performance. The results show that the incorporation of top-down saccadic control benefits classification performance compared to the purely bottom-up control, reducing the amount of visual input required for correct classification. We conclude that NIM-CLASSTD may provide a fruitful basis for an active visual cognitive system in a humanoid robot that enables efficient visual processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of health care depends, among others, on the quality of a physician's domain knowledge. Since it is impossible to keep up with all new findings and developments, physicians usually have gaps in their domain knowledge. To handle exceptional cases, access to the full range of medical literature is required. The specific literature needed for appropriate treatment of the patient is described by a physician's information need. Physicians are often unaware of their information needs. To support them, this paper This research is part of the MIA project (Medical Information Agent), which is funded by NWO (grant number 634.000.021). aims at presenting a first step towards automatically formulating patient-related information needs. We start investigating how we can model a physician's information needs in general. Then we propose an approach to instantiate the model into a representation of a physician's information needs using the patient data as stored in a medical record. Our experiments show that this approach is feasible. Since the number of formulated patient-related information needs is rather high, we propose the use of filters. Future research will focus on the combination of personalization and filtering. It is expected that the resultant set of information needs will have a manageable size and contributes to the quality of health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microscopic analysis is a standard approach in the study of robot behaviour. Typically, the approach comprises the analysis of a single (or sometimes a few) robot-environment system(s) to reveal specific properties of robot behaviour. In contrast to microscopic analysis, macroscopic analysis focuses on averaged properties of systems. The advantage is that such a property is easier to generalize so that it can be established to what extent the property is universal. This paper investigates whether a macroscopic analysis can reveal a universal property of adaptive behaviour in a robot model of foraging behaviour. Our analysis reveals that the step lengths of the most successful robots are distributed according to a Lévy-flight distribution. From studies on a variety of natural species, it is known that such a distribution constitutes a universal property of foraging behaviour. Thereafter, we discuss an example of how macroscopic analysis can be applied to existing research in evolutionary robotics, and relate the macroscopic and microscopic analyses of foraging behaviour to the framework of scientific research described by Cohen (1995, Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press)). We conclude that macroscopic analysis may predict universal properties of adaptive behaviour and that it may complement microscopic analysis in the study of adaptive behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse the classification of zoological illustrations. Historically, zoological illustrations were the modus operandi for the documentation of new species, and now serve as crucial sources for long-term ecological and biodiversity research. By employing computational methods for classification, the data can be made amenable to research. Automated species identification is challenging due to the long-tailed nature of the data, and the millions of possible classes in the species taxonomy. Success commonly depends on large training sets with many examples per class, but images from only a subset of classes are digitally available, and many images are unlabelled, since labelling requires domain expertise. We explore zero-shot learning to address the problem, where features are learned from classes with medium to large samples, which are then transferred to recognise classes with few or no training samples. We specifically explore how distributed, multi-modal background knowledge from data providers, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), iNaturalist, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), can be used to share knowledge between classes for zero-shot learning. We train a prototypical network for zero-shot classification, and introduce fused prototypes (FP) and hierarchical prototype loss (HPL) to optimise the model. Finally, we analyse the performance of the model for use in real-world applications. The experimental results are encouraging, indicating potential for use of such models in an expert support system, but also express the difficulty of our task, showing a necessity for research into computer vision methods that are able to learn from small samples. • A zero-shot prototypical learning approach was proposed to deal with the limited availability of training data. • Methods to include knowledge from a variable number of multimodal sources in single prototypes were compared. • Effects of training the proposed model with hierarchical prototype loss were measured. • The ZICE (Zoological Illustrations and Class Embeddings) dataset, created from multi-modal background knowledge, was introduced and used to test the proposed model. • The performance of the proposed model was analysed qualitatively on real-world data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large collections of historical biodiversity expeditions are housed in natural history museums throughout the world. Potentially they can serve as rich sources of data for cultural historical and biodiversity research. However, they exist as only partially catalogued specimen repositories and images of unstructured, non-standardised, hand-written text and drawings. Although many archival collections have been digitised, disclosing their content is challenging. They refer to historical place names and outdated taxonomic classifications and are written in multiple languages. Efforts to transcribe the hand-written text can make the content accessible, but semantically describing and interlinking the content would further facilitate research. We propose a semantic model that serves to structure the named entities in natural history archival collections. In addition, we present an approach for the semantic annotation of these collections whilst documenting their provenance. This approach serves as an initial step for an adaptive learning approach for semi-automated extraction of named entities from natural history archival collections. The applicability of the semantic model and the annotation approach is demonstrated using image scans from a collection of 8, 000 field book pages gathered by the Committee for Natural History of the Netherlands Indies between 1820 and 1850, and evaluated together with domain experts from the field of natural and cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including relation between computers and intitution; classification of Semeai in the game Go; and International Computer Games Association events.

The article announces the 11th Annual "Humies" Award to several chess players including Omid E. David, Moshe Koppel and Nathan S. Netanyahu.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker, contribution of Jos Uiterwijk in Domineering and several chess tournament winners such as the Best Publication Award to Abdallah Saffidine.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including computer implementation LEONIDAS of the relatively new game Epaminondas; Box Off game and artificial intelligence.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including encoding of games by applying fast bitwise-parallel algorithms, knowledge-based solving of Domineering boards, and idea regarding solving Sudoku.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including higher level thinking games like chess, the Chinese chess endgames, and new findings in solving chess endgames.

The article offers information on the 18th Computer Olympiad held at the Leiden University in Leiden, the Netherlands from June 29 – July 5, 2015. It mentions games that were played during the Olympiad including Amazons, Backgammon and Breakthrough. It lists gold medal winners in the Olympiad including Richard Lorentz, Shi-Jim Yen and William Fraser.

Provides information on the Belgian Dutch Artificial Intelligence Association. Brief information on the foundation of the organization; Rationale on the establishment of the association; Contributions of the association in the field of artificial intelligence.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses changes made to the journal such as its publication by the publishing firm IOS Press after it signed contract with the International Computer Games Association.

Comments on the three main requirements for models of vision associated with the theory of representation by similarities. Translation and scale variance of human recognition; Scalability; Sequential and hierarchical nature of visual processing.

Traditionally, the analysis of visual arts is performed by human art experts only. The availability of advanced artificial intelligence techniques makes it possible to support art experts in their judgement of visual art. In this article currently available image-analysis techniques are applied. Our aim is (1) to determine how successful the usage of complementary colours was in the oeuvre of Vincent Van Gogh and (2) whether this characteristic may make his paintings identifiable in time. It is commonly acknowledged that, especially in his French period, Van Gogh started employing complementary colours to emphasize contours of objects or parts of scenes. This article proposes a new method called MECOCO [1] MECOCO stands for Method for the Extraction of COmplementary COlours. 1 to measure complementary-colour usage in a painting by combining an opponent-colour space representation with Gabor filtering. To achieve the aim, (1) we defined a novel measure called the opponency value that quantifies the usage of complementary-colour transitions in a painting and (2) we studied Van Gogh’s painting style. MECOCO’s analysis of a dataset of 145 digitised and colour-calibrated oil-on-canvas paintings confirms the global transition pattern of complementary colours in Van Gogh’s paintings as generally acknowledged by art experts. In addition, MECOCO also provides an objective and quantifiable way to support the analysis of colours in individual paintings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The visual detection and recognition of objects is facilitated by context. This paper studies two types of learning methods for realizing context-based object detection in paintings. The first method is called the gradient method; it learns to transform the spatial context into a gradient towards the object. The second method, the context-detection method, learns to detect image regions that are likely to contain objects. The accuracy and speed of both methods are evaluated on a face-detection task involving natural and painted faces in a wide variety of contexts. The experimental results show that the gradient method enhances accuracy at the cost of computational speed, whereas the context-detection method optimises speed at the cost of accuracy. The different results of both methods are argued to arise from the different ways in which the methods trade-off accuracy and speed. We conclude that both the gradient method and the context-detection method can be applied to reliable and fast object detection in paintings and that the choice for either method depends on the application and user constraints. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]