Call for Papers - IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG) - Special Issue on Game Competition Frameworks for Research and Education

[Diego Perez]

[Apologises for multiple postings]

Call for Papers

IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG)

Special Issue on Game Competition Frameworks for Research and Education

Editors: Jialin Liu, Diego Perez-Liebana, Tristan Cazenave, Ruck Thawonmas

Submission Deadline: 8 January 2018                            

* IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG) is the former IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG).

Games are an ideal domain to study computational intelligence methods because they provide affordable, competitive, dynamic, reproducible environments suitable for testing new search algorithms, pattern-based evaluation methods, or machine learning concepts.Diverse game competitions have been designed for different research purposes and some of them have been successfully organised for 10 years, such as the game Go competition series and PacMan competition series. The past game competitions organised in conferences, industry or as private leagues have covered various games, from single-player board/video games to real-time strategy games. In different competitions, the participants are invited to submit an agent to play a specific game or a set of unknown games without intervention of human at least as good as professional human players, or to submit an agent to design a game or game rules. These have not only received submissions from academic institutions, but also attracted the attention of the games industry. Dozens of universities have used different game competition frameworks in modules of Game Design, Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. 

The following is a list of suggested, not exclusive, competitions for this special issue:

• Angry Birds Level Generation
• Computer Game Olympiads (including Chess, Amazons, Backgammon, Bridge, Chinese Chess, Dots and Boxes, Draughts, Go, ...)
• Dota2 Bot
• Fighting Game AI
• Game Data Mining
• General Video Game AI
• Geometry Friends Cooperative Game AI
• microRTS AI
• Ms. Pac-Man Vs Ghost Team
• Showdown AI
• StarCraft AI
• Text-Based Adventure AI
• Visual Doom AI
  

We invite the submission of papers about high quality work on game competition frameworks, entry submissions, their use as research testbeds to obtain novel experimental results, or as educational and teaching material. Regular, short and letter papers are invited to this special issue, with the following suggestion for these lengths: 

• Letter papers detailing use of competitions as educational or teaching material OR describing competition entries; 
• Short papers with a technical description of the game competition framework (including link to the released code of the benchmark) OR a description of competition entries; 
• Regular papers describing work using a competition benchmark as a research environment for novel experimental results, OR description  of the game competition including analysis of the top entries and final results.

Competition organisers and participants are encouraged to communicate and collaborate with each other to avoid duplicating descriptions of framework, rules, entries, etc. For more information, see the special issue webpage.

Authors should follow normal TOG guidelines for their submissions, but clearly identify their papers for this special issue during the submission process. Extended versions of previously published conference or workshop papers are welcome, provided that the journal paper is a significant extension, and is accompanied by a cover letter explaining the additional contribution. See here for author information and page length limit.

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Diego Pérez Liébana

Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering

University of Essex

email: dpe...@essex.ac.uk

web: http://www.diego-perez.net​