Editorial

The December issue of 2018 continues the previous issue to include ten papers orally presented in the second day (July 10) of the Tenth International Conference on Computers and Games (CG 2018).

The first contribution in this issue, titled An investigation of the game of Defend the Island by Jr-Chang Chen and Chin-Lin Shiue, is extended from a work presented in CG 2018. The original version titled A new game: Defend the Island is thus excluded from the conference proceedings. In the work, a new two-player game of imperfect information, named Defend the Island, is introduced. Chen and Shiue also investigate some properties of the game when the map is a cycle.

The second contribution is on the two classical board games, checkers and draughts. The work titled Complexity of checkers and draughts on different board sizes by Jan-Jaap van Horssen calculates and empirically determines the complexities of the two games. 6 × 6 checkers and 6 × 6 draughts are weakly solved as draws, and the complexities of the two games on board sizes of 8 × 8, 10 × 10, 12 × 12, and 14 × 14 are estimated.

Additionally, this issue includes five reports. The first is by Qiang Gao et al. which summarizes the history and discusses the rapid development of computer game tournaments in China. For the second, Chung-Chin Shih et al. reports the results of the 1^st World AI Go Open held in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China, during 16–18 August 2017, and makes some remarks on the development of computer Go. The third to the fifth reports are related to chess. Karsten Müller and Guy Haworth report the analyses of the endgames in Game 6 and Game 13 of the World Chess Championship 2018. The analyses are done by chess programs Stockfish-Fathom and FinalGen respectively. Specifically, the result of Game 6 was a draw; however, Stockfish-Fathom had found a counter-intuitive strategy and called ‘mate’ for Black. The next report by Guy Haworth is the news on the 7-man Syzygy chess endgame. The endgame tables were published on 9 September 2018 by Bojun Guo, which is considered a major achievement of 2018. Finally, Lars Sandin and Guy Haworth provides the latest SSDF rating list (2018-10) of chess engines.

Having served as the acting Editor-in-Chief for two years, I am happy to see wide public interest in the community of computer games. Starting from the 41st volume (2019), my duties will be transferred to Mark Winands, one of our current Editors-in-Chief.

I-Chen Wu