Editorial

First of all, I would like to thank Prof. I-Chen Wu for his contributions to the ICGA Journal the last two years. It is an honor to succeed him as Editor-in-Chief. On behalf of my editorial colleagues, authors, and readers of the ICGA Journal, I wish him well in continuing his games research. Additionally, I would like to thank Chu-Hsuan Hsueh and Ting-Han Wei for their editorial support. Chiara Sironi, Maastricht University, will succeed them. We will all strive to maintain the high standards, which the National Chiao-Tung University team has consistently achieved.

The first contribution of this issue is A fast nonogram solver that won the TAAI 2017 and ICGA 2018 tournaments by Yen-Chi Chen and Shun-Shii Lin. This article discusses the approach behind their Nonogram program, named Requiem, which solved all 1000 puzzles in every Nonogram tournament from 2011 to 2018 faster than all previous medal programs.

The second contribution is on the well-known α-β enhancement MTD(f). The work titled Move selection in MTD(f) by Jan-Jaap van Horssen shows that in the presence of search inconsistencies there is a safe mechanism to select the best move.

Additionally, this issue includes seven reports. The first is by Guy Haworth and Nelson Hernandez, which discusses the 12th Top Chess Engine Championship. In their second report, they give the results of the TCEC Cup, a knockout event, introduced by the TCEC organization. Subsequently, four reports discuss, respectively, the Hex, 10 × 10 Othello, Connect6, and Einstein tournament that took place at the 21st Computer Olympiad. In the last report of this issue, Karsten Müller and Guy Haworth illustrate new discoveries in chess endgames by using FinalGen.

This issue also contains two calls for papers. One for the Advances in Computer and Games Conference (ACG 2019) that will be held in Macao, in conjunction with the 22nd Computer Olympiad, the World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (one of the premier academic AI research conferences). ACG 2019 will be held during August 11–13, 2019. The other is one for a special issue on computer aided game and puzzle design, projected to be published in the ICGA journal for 2020. Cameron Browne and Antonios Liapis will be responsible for this special issue.

Mark Winands