Computers and Games

ThisbookcontainsthepaperspresentedattheFirstInternationalConferenceon Computers and Games (CG'98) held at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL), in Tsukuba, Japan, on November 11-12, 1998. TheCG'98focusesonallaspectsofresearchrelatedtocomputersandgames. Relevanttopics include, but arenotlimited to,the currentstate ofgame-playing programs. The book contains new theoretical developments in game-related - search, general scienti c contributions produced by the study of games, social aspects of computer games, mathematical games, cognitive research of how - mans play games, and so on. As this volume shows, CG'98 is an international conference, with participants from many di erent countries who have di erent backgrounds and hence exhibit di erent views on computers and games. The Conference was the rst one in a series of conferences on this topic. It was a direct follow-up of many successful computer-games-relatedevents held in Japan, such as the series of four Game Programming Workshops (GPW'94 to GPW'97) and the IJCAI-97 Workshop on Computer Games. The technical program consisted of a keynote lecture, titled: Predictions (by H.J. van den Herik), and 21 presentations of accepted papers. The conference was preceded by an informal Workshop on November 10, 1998. The Program Committee (PC) received 35 submissions. Eachpaper was sent to three referees, who were selected on the basis of their expert knowledge. Twelve papers were acceptedimmediately,12paperswerenotaccepted,and11paperswerereturned to the authors with the request to improve them, and with the statement that they would be refereed again. Finally, with the help of many referees (see the endofthis preface),the PCaccepted21papers forpresentationandpublication.