Previous News 2008 - 2024

2024 News

Dec 19: A paper accepted for AAMAS 2025: β-DQN: Improving Deep Q-Learning By Evolving the Behavior. Congratulations Hongming!
Dec 9: Taylor Folkersen has joined our group as a programmer/analyst, working on algorithms for combinatorial games. Welcome Taylor!
Oct 22: Two papers accepted for CG 2024! Analysing KataGo: A Comparative Evaluation Against Perfect Play in the Game of Go and Solving Linear NoGo with Combinatorial Game Theory. Congratulations Asmaul and Henry!!
Oct 6: Our journal paper A Distance-based Anomaly Detection Framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning was accepted for TMLR! Congratulations Hongming!
Sep 25: Our paper Exploiting the Replay Memory Before Exploring the Environment: Enhancing Reinforcement Learning Through Empirical MDP Iteration was accepted for NeurIPS 2024! Congratulations Hongming!
Sep 3 - Dec: teaching CMPUT 455
Aug 8: Our paper Learning With Generalised Card Representations for "Magic: The Gathering" won best student paper award at the IEEE Conference on Games 2024! Congratulations Timo!
Aug 8: Owen presents our paper Expected Work Search: Combining Win Rate and Proof Size Estimation at IJCAI 2024.
Aug 6: Visit by recent MSc graduate Jiuqi Wang, now a PhD student at the University of Virginia.
July: Recent PhD graduate Chenjun Xiao has joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen as an assistant professor! Congratulations Chenjun!
Jun 30: Our paper "Neural Network-based Information Set Weighting for Playing Reconnaissance Blind Chess" was accepted for the IEEE Transactions on Games 2024! Congratulations Timo! This is an extended version of our CoG 2023 paper.
Jun 30: My five year term as "DeepMind Chair in Artificial Intelligence" has come to an end. A whole-hearted thank you to DeepMind for the honor and the funding!
Jun 19: Our paper "Efficiently Training Neural Networks for Imperfect-Information Games by Sampling Information Sets" was accepted for KI 2024, the German AI conference. Congratulations Timo!
June 6-28: Martin's Visit to Taiwan. Owen joined for part of the time. Stayed at Academia Sinica in Taipei, as guest of Ti-Rong Wu. We visited I-Chen Wu and his group at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu. I gave two talks, one at Academia Sinica on Rejwana's and Asmaul's research, and one at the Taiwanese Computer Game Association (TCGA) conference in Hualien, on seki in the game of Go. Owen gave a talk on EWS at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.
May 15: Owen passed his Candidacy exam! Congratulations!
May 1: Our Department celebrated its 60th birthday today!
Apr 24: Congratulations Owen on winning a NSERC PGS D award!
Apr 17: Asmaul passed her MSc exam! Congratulations!
Apr 16: Our paper "Expected Work Search: Combining Win Rate and Proof Size Estimation" was just accepted at IJCAI! Congratulations Owen and Ting!
Apr 15: Our paper Learning With Generalised Card Representations for "Magic: The Gathering" was accepted for the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2024! Congratulations Timo!
Apr 12: Last CMPUT 204 class
Mar 21: Ehsan passed his MSc exam! Congratulations!
Mar 4: Recent MSc graduate Zeyi Wang is in town, recruiting for his company Astrus
Jan-Apr: Martin is teaching a very large section of CMPUT 204 - Algorithms.

2023 News

Dec 8: Our paper "Monte Carlo Tree Search in the Presence of Transition Uncertainty" just accepted at AAAI-24! Congratulations Farnaz, Kiarash, Hongming and Ting!
Nov 28-30: our group has three talks at the (online) Advances in Computer Games conference - two papers accepted, and Martin's keynote on "Solution Methods for Two Player Games"
Oct 23: Two papers accepted for Advances in Computer Games 2023. "Stockfish or Leela Chess Zero? A Comparison Against Endgame Tablebases" started out as Quazi, Asmaul's course project for Martin's graduate course last term. "Solving NoGo on Small Rectangular Boards" was Henry's summer project. Congratulations Quazi, Asmaul and Henry!
Oct 23: Hongming passed his candidacy. Congratulations!
Sep-Dec: Martin is teaching CMPUT 455 again, with 215 students this year
Jul 18: A many-author paper about the RBC (Reconnaissance Blind Chess) competition at NeurIPS, including Timo's program, got accepted for PMLR. Gratulations Timo!
Jun 23-25: Martin is attending the Alberta-Montana Combinatorics & Algorithms Days at BIRS
Jun 19: Jiuqi passed his MSc defense. Congratulations!
Jun 16: Hongming is presenting his ICLR paper "Replay Memory as An Empirical MDP: Combining Conservative Estimation with Experience Replay" at the AI Seminar
May 23-25: at Upper Bound.
May 9: Two papers accepted for IEEE Conference on Games 2023, "Deep Dive on Checkers Endgame Data" and "Weighting Information Sets with Siamese Neural Networks in Reconnaissance Blind Chess". Gratulations Jiuqi and Timo!
May 2: Group meetings are Wed 2pm in Ath 332. Guests are always welcome. Contact Hongming for more information.
May 1: Welcome Mark Usmanov! He is joining our group over the summer to work on an efficient solver for combinatorial games.
May 1: Grades submitted, ready to start summer research!
Apr 12: course project presentations on the last day of CMPUT 657.
Jan 20: Our paper "Replay Memory as An Empirical MDP: Combining Conservative Estimation with Experience Replay" was accepted to ICLR 2023. Congratulations Hongming!
Jan 9: Martin teaches a grad course CMPUT 657 this term

2022 News

Dec 23 Martin's very intense teaching term is finally over. Taught two large classes, CMPUT 204 and CMPUT 455, with 450 students in total.
Oct 20 Our paper "Improving Search in Go Using Bounded Static Safety" has been accepted for presentation at CG2022. Congratulations Owen and Ting!
Oct 14: Zeyi passed his MSc defence! Congratulations Zeyi!
Aug 10: Bedir passed his MSc defence! Congratulations Bedir!
Aug 9: Asmaul Husna has joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Asmaul!
Jun 27: Chenjun passed his PhD defence! Congratulations Chenjun!
Jun 15: Our short paper "Supervised and Reinforcement Learning from Observations in Reconnaissance Blind Chess" has been accepted for IEEE COG 2022, the Conference on Games. Congratulations Timo!
May 1: Henry Du and Dat Tran joined our group as summer students. Welcome Henry and Dat!
Apr 21: Farnaz passed her MSc defence! Congratulations Farnaz!
Apr 20: Kiarash passed his MSc defence! Congratulations Kiarash!
Apr 7: last day of teaching for CMPUT 455 and 655
Mar 4: Ehsan Futuhi has joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Ehsan!
Winter 2022: teaching CMPUT 455 and CMPUT 655 - Algorithms in Combinatorial Game Theory

2021 News

Nov 20: First update to this webpage in a year and a half. A lot has happened in the meantime...
Nov 18: Rejwana passed her MSc defence! Congratulations Rejwana!
Nov 16: Rejwana gave her thesis seminar "On the Road to Perfection? Evaluating LeelaChess Zero Against Endgame Tablebases".
Nov 12: Chenjun gave the Department's Weekly AI Seminar about his ICML paper "On the Optimality of Batch Policy Optimization Algorithms".
Nov 1: Solimul passed his PhD defence! Congratulations Solimul! In January, he will start a postdoc at CMU with Marijn Heule.
Oct 18: Our paper "On the Road to Perfection? Evaluating LeelaChess Zero Against Endgame Tablebases" was accepted for the conference on Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2021), with some great reviews. Congratulations Rejwana and Ting!
Sep 15: Jiuqi Wang has joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Jiuqi!
Sep 2: Teaching Cmput 174 - Introduction to the Foundations of Computation I. Teaching in-person. Exciting and scary to be back in a real classroom.
Sep 1: Owen will stay in our group, but got "promoted" from undergrad to MSc student.
Aug 21: The attendees have voted, and our paper "Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking" has won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Games! Congratulations Timo!
Aug 17: Timo is presenting our paper "Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking" in the IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2021)
Aug 17-21: online-attending the IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2021)
Aug 9: Farnaz is starting a part-time internship with Huawei in Edmonton.
July 9: Solimul's SAT solver kissat_gb is based on Armin Biere's kissat system and is enhanced with several techniques developed by Solimul. It took third place in both SAT track and Main Track at the SAT Competition 2021. Congratulations Solimul!

End of June/early July: I finished my stay at JKU Linz, and my family and me returned to Edmonton. Quite a complicated trip with all the COVID rules and restrictions and mandatory quarantine.
June 21: Solimul is starting his internship at Amazon.
Jun 18: Our paper "A Comparison of Contextual and Non-Contextual Preference Ranking for Set Addition Problems" has been accepted to the ICML 2021 workshop on Subset Selection in Machine Learning: From Theory to Applications. Congratulations Timo!
May: Chenjun won an Outstanding Reviewer Award at ICLR 2021. Congratulations Chenjun!
May 21: Our paper "Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking" has been accepted for IEEE COG 2021, the Conference on Games. Congratulations Timo!
May 20: After two terms of online courses, Hongming has finally arrived in Edmonton! Welcome in-person Hongming!
May 1: Owen Randall is working on the Go solver project as a summer undergrad student, and will join our group as MSc in the fall. Welcome Owen!
April 28: Solimul is giving a talk (online) at Simons Institute at Berkeley, Theoretical Foundations of SAT/SMT Solving, on Boolean Satisfiability Extensions of CDCL Branching Heuristics by Exploration during Conflict Depression.
Feb 16: Solimul is giving an online seminar at the University of Waterloo on his work on expSAT.
Jan 29: Solimul was awarded the very competitive NSERC PDF (Postdoctoral Fellowship). Congratulations Solimul!
Jan 19: appointed as a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (CCAI) at Amii!
Jan 12: Got the NSERC Alliance grant!
Jan 11: Kiarash is starting a part-time internship with Huawei in Edmonton.

2020 News

Oct 7: Joining the seminar "Seminar in Computational Engineering - Puzzling Dancing Links" with Armin Biere and Juffi Fürnkranz.
Oct 1: I will be a Research Fellow at JKU Linz for the winter term 2020/21 and the summer term 2021. I am working with Juffi and his students on different topics in games and ML. With PhD student Timo Bertram we are looking at "drafting" or selecting cards in modern card games.
Sep 1: Hongming Zhang has joined our group as a new PhD student in the Statistical Machine Learning program. Welcome Hongming!
Sep 1: I am starting my one year sabbatical. I am spending most of it at Johannes Kepler Universität (JKU) Linz, working with Juffi Fürnkranz and Armin Biere.
Aug 26: Solimul was awarded an Ernst Mach grant from OeAD, the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research. This will cover the costs for a visit with Armin Biere in Linz to work on SAT. Congratulations Solimul!
June 26: Chenjun's paper "On the Global Convergence Rates of Softmax Policy Gradient Methods" with Jincheng Mei, Csaba Szepesvari and Dale Schuurmans was accepted for ICML 2020. Congratulations Chenjun!
June 24: Hongming Zhang of Peking University will join us as a PhD student in the fall. Welcome Hongming!
June 5: Amir Shukayev is leaving the group to start his internship at Jane Street Capital. Congratulations Amir!
May 1: Prateek Garg of IIT Delhi joins us (remotely) as a summer intern, working on MMCTS with Zeyi. Welcome Prateek!
May 1: Christian Jans starts with his NSERC USRA. Welcome Christian!
Apr 23: Finished online teaching and online final exams for Cmput 325 and 455. Thanks Ting for co-teaching 455 with me!
Apr 3: Chao submitted his PhD thesis Search and Learning Algorithms for Two-Player Games with Application to the Game of Hex.
Mar 26: Christian Jans received an NSERC USRA! He will join us this summer to work on the game of clobber. Congratulations Christian!
Mar 23: Chao passed his PhD defense! Congratulations Dr. Gao!
Feb 9/13: Solimul's AAAI oral presentation, and his paper in the news.
Jan 31: Our Undergraduate AI Society invited me to give a talk on "Computer Go - from the Beginnings to MuZero". Go check out their activities!
Jan 22: Farnaz Kohankhaki, Zeyi Wang and Kiarash Aghakasiri have joined our group as MSc students. Welcome Farnaz, Zeyi and Kiarash!
Jan 22: New on our research pages: a page about Yunpeng Tang's MSc work on algorithms for random sampling from time-changing discrete distributions, including a link to his thesis.
Jan 17: Bedir Tapkan has joined the Hex group led by Ryan Hayward as a MSc student, and I will co-supervise. Welcome Bedir!
Jan 14: Rejwana Haque has joined our group as a MSc student. Welcome Rejwana!
Jan 10: Amir Shukayev has joined our group as an undergraduate student. Welcome Amir!
Jan 7: a new term begins. I am teaching two large classes, Cmput 325, and 455 together with Ting.

2019 News

Nov 21: Yunpeng Tang defended his thesis An Empirical Study of Random Sampling Methods for Changing Discrete Distributions today. Congratulations Yunpeng!
Nov 19: Scotiabank announces a $1.25M donation for the Scotiabank Artificial Intelligence Research Initiative. See the Science News article.
Nov 10: The paper "Guiding CDCL SAT search via random exploration amid conflict depression" has been accepted for oral presentation (only 5.8% of all submitted papers are) at AAAI-20. Congratulations Solimul!
Nov 4: we will receive funding from UAHJIC to work with Hengshuai Yao of Huawei.
Nov 1: Ting-Han Wei starts as a postdoc in our group. Welcome Ting!
Nov 1: Gaojian Fan won our department's Ph.D. Outstanding Thesis Award. Congratulations Gaojian!
Oct 26: UAlberta ICPC teams did very well at the 2019 Rocky Mountain Regional Contest, placing four teams in the top ten. Congratulations all programming club students and coach Zac!
Oct 5: Ting-Han Wei will start as a postdoc in our group on Nov 1. Welcome Ting!
Oct 2 - 30: Teaching my second CMPUT 174 "after MOOC" section
Oct 1: The paper "Adaptive Planning Horizon for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning" has been accepted for the NeurIPS 2019 Deep RL Workshop. Congratulations Chenjun!
Sep 30 - Oct 4: Solimul is attending CP'2019 and presenting our paper "Exploiting glue clauses to design effective CDCL branching heuristics".
Sep 13: Serving on the SPC for AAAI-20
Sep 4: Teaching my first CMPUT 174 "after MOOC" section
Sep 3: The paper "Maximum Entropy Monte Carlo Planning" has been accepted for NeurIPS 2019. Congratulations Chenjun and Jincheng!
End of Aug: Will is finishing his NSERC USRA. Some of my grad students are finishing their summer internships at Microsoft and Huawei
Aug 9: Solimul passed his candidacy exam today. Congratulations Solimul!
July 24: Elected as an Amii Fellow. Amii is the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.
July 12: Great results for Solimul's SAT solvers in SAT Race 2019! Second place for expMaple_CM_GCBumpOnlyLRB in the UNSAT Track, and third place for expMaple_BumpOnly in the SAT+UNSAT combined track with SCR scoring (total number of solved instances, coverage). Congratulations Solimul!
July 1: The paper "Exploiting glue clauses to design effective CDCL branching heuristics" has been accepted for CP'2019. Congratulations Solimul!
July 1: Awarded the inaugural DeepMind Chair in Artificial Intelligence in our department!
May 13: Yunpeng starts his internship at Microsoft, and Chenjun starts his internship at Huawei.
May 10: The paper "On Principled Entropy Exploration in Policy Optimization" has been accepted for IJCAI 2019. Congratulations Jincheng and Chenjun!
May 9: Daniel Harabor visits. His PhD supervisor Adi Botea was my PhD student. Daniel is now a DECRA Senior Research Fellow at Monash.
May 1: Will Fenton is joining our group over the summer. He won a NSERC USRA. Will is working on the game Amazons. Welcome Will!
April 29: Chao starts his internship at Huawei.
April 29: All exams and projects marked and all grades submitted!
Apr 18: Gaojian passed his PhD defense! Congratulations Gaojian!
Feb 7: Solimul has been awarded an Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Scholarship. Congratulations Solimul!
Jan - Apr: A very busy term teaching three courses, Cmput 325, 496 and 655 in Winter 2019
Jan 14: Chenjun starts his Mitacs Accelerate with Borealis AI in Edmonton

2018 News

Aug 12-16: In Edinburgh as external examiner for Mihai Dobre's PhD. Giving a seminar talk at the University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum on "Two recent advances in Monte Carlo Tree Search" - presenting Chenjun's AAAI paper and Chao's IJCAI paper.

July 17: Presenting Chao's work (with Ryan and me) on the "Three-Head Neural Network Architecture for Monte Carlo Tree Search" at the IJCAI main conference. See the paper and the talk slides.
July 13: Presenting the paper by Farhad and me on "Analyzing the impact of knowledge and search in Monte Carlo Tree Search in Go" at the IJCAI Computer Games Workshop. See the paper and the talk slides.
July 12-20: in Stockholm for IJCAI-ECAI, SOCS and the Computer Games Workshop.
July 6: Solimul has been awarded a two year NSERC PGS D Scholarship. Congratulations Solimul!
July 3/15: Chenjun and Chao start their internships at Borealis AI in Edmonton, working with Ruitong Huang and Matt Taylor.

Jun 4: Congratulations Chao on passing your candidacy!

May 30: Our paper Analyzing the impact of knowledge and search in Monte Carlo Tree Search in Go based on Farhad's MSc thesis, was accepted for CGW, the Computer Games Workshop at IJCAI. Congratulations Farhad!
May 1: Farhad's MSc thesis Analyzing the impact of knowledge and search in Monte Carlo Tree Search in Go.

Apr 27: "A Transferable Neural Network for Hex" has been accepted for CG 2018. Congratulations Chao, Siqi and Ryan!
Apr 27: Cmput 496 grades submitted and approved.
Apr 16: "Three-Head Neural Network Architecture for Monte Carlo Tree Search" has been accepted for IJCAI-ECAI 2018. Congratulations Chao and Ryan!
Apr 16: I presented our group's past and present research during the event L'IA et le Canada organized by the Paris Machine Learning Meetup
Apr 12: Last Cmput 496 class for this term!
Apr 11: Congratulations Farhad on passing your MSc defense!

Mar 25-28: Visited Qiang Ye at The School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences of UPEI, the University of Prince Edward's Island in beautiful Charlottetown. Gave a talk on "Computer Go: from the beginnings to AlphaGo Zero" as part of their new Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Presentation Series.
Mar 20: "Adversarial Policy Gradient for Alternating Markov Games" has been accepted for ICLR 2018 Workshop Track 2018. Congratulations Chao and Ryan!
Mar 15: Camera-ready final version of Gaojian's ICAPS 2018 paper MS-lite: A Lightweight, Complementary Merge-and-Shrink Method added to publications.

Jan 28: "MS-lite: A Lightweight, Complementary Merge-and-Shrink Method" has been accepted for ICAPS 2018. Congratulations Gaojian and Rob!
Jan 17: Big news! Memory-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Search won the outstanding paper award at AAAI-18. Congratulations Chenjun and Jincheng!
Jan 9: First Cmput 496 class. 124 students registered! Our largest 4th year CS class ever, I think.

2017 News

Dec 15: "Move Prediction using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks in Hex" accepted to IEEE Transactions on Games. Congratulations Chao and Ryan!

Nov 30: "Preliminary Results on Exploration-Driven Satisfiability Solving" was accepted for the AAAI-18 Student Abstract and Poster Program, and selected as a finalist to participate in the 3 minute contest within the student track. Congratulations Solimul!
Nov 8: "Memory-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Search" accepted for AAAI-18. Congratulations Chenjun and Jincheng!

Sep 17+18: visiting GIX in Seattle.
Sep - Dec: revising Cmput 496 before teaching it the second time in Winter 2018.
Sep - Oct: working on AAAI papers.

Aug: Former summer student Yunpeng Tang re-joins our group as a MSc student, starting in the fall. Welcome back Yunpeng!

Jul 24: Our paper on Structured Best Arm Identification with Fixed Confidence was accepted for ALT 2017. Congratulations Ruitong and Mohammad!

Jun 30: Finished my three year term as Associate Chair (Research) 2014-17. Ioanis Nikolaidis is the new ACR.
Jun: Gaojian's talk at ICAPS.
Jun 6: back from my amazing trip to China! Commented on the AlphaGo matches for Synced (jiqizhixin), visited AI startup companies in games and medicine, presented at GMIS in front of 2000 attendees, visited Tencent AI lab, NUDT, Tsinghua and Baidu Research. See some of my talks there.

May 21: on my way to Beijing for the Synced Global Machine Intelligence Summit, and some research lab visits!
May: looking forward to the upcoming Future of Go Summit, including the match AlphaGo against Ke Jie.

Apr 24: Congratulations Chao and Gaojian on your IJCAI papers!!! Chao's paper, with Ryan Hayward, is titled "Focused Depth-first Proof Number Search using Convolutional Neural Networks for the Game of Hex". Gaojian's paper, with Rob Holte, is "Additive Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics for Diverse Action Costs".
Apr: the very busy term is finally over!
Mar/Apr: Reviewing for ICAPS and IJCAI.

Feb: Busy teaching 496 and 655.
Feb: Working on some IJCAI submissions.

Jan: Busy teaching 496 and 655.
Jan 26: Gaojian's ICAPS paper accepted! Congratulations!
Jan 2017: AlphaGo, playing under the handles magist and master, beats all human opponents in fast games on two internet Go servers. Score 60:0. Game records part 1 and part 2.

2016 News

November/December: Still working on Cmput 496 development. Over 90 students registered! Twice as large as any existing 4th year course.
November/December: Guest teaching in 204, 366, and 609.

October: NSERC DG and RTI crunch time. Lots of files to review.
October: We're hiring in (1) Natural Language Processing, (2) Systems Security, (3) Green and Sustainable Computing, (4) Robotics. "Excellent candidates in other areas of Computing Science may also be considered."

September: Welcome Md Solimul Chowdhury! Solimul comes back from industry as a PhD student. I co-supervise him together with Jia You, who was Solimul's MSc supervisor.
September: Working on Cmput 496 development.

Aug 30: Chenjun passed his MSc exam today. Congratulations! He will stay here as a PhD student.

June/July: visiting DeepMind and attending ICAPS in London, then visiting family in Austria.
June 26, Edmonton: Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) Summer meeting, Special Session on Combinatorial Games to celebrate Richard K. Guy's 100th birthday. Sad to miss it because I will be in Austria, visiting my dad who is "only" turning 90 this year.
June 2: Abdallah gave his second talk, about the complexity of card games. Many of them are hard!

May 23: Our paper "Integrating factorization ranked features into MCTS: an experimental study" was accepted for Computer Games Workshop at IJCAI. Congratulations Chenjun!
May 13: Abdallah gave a nice talk about connection games. See the paper on arxiv.
May 9: Abdallah Saffidine is visiting us for a month. Welcome back Abdallah!
May 2: Summer games research is starting. Welcome back Andrew and Yunpeng!

April 8: last day of classes.

March 25: Welcome new group member, MSc student Farhad Haqiqat!
March 8 - 15: tons of activities around the Lee Sedol - AlphaGo match. 4-1 for AlphaGo! See my talk at Faculty of Science and our video. Some day I will list the press articles, too.
March 1: Let's talk about IT - CS industry mixer event was a big success with over 200 attending.

Jan 28: Fan Xie won the 2016 Faculty of Science Dissertation Award!!! Congratulations!!!
Jan 27: Huge Computer Go news today. In a paper published in Nature, a group at Google Deepmind led by our PhD graduate David Silver and our former Postdoc Aja Huang describe AlphaGo, the first Professional Level Go Program!!! Congratulations!!!
Jan 4: Winter 2016 term starts. I am teaching Cmput 204 and 325.

Board Games Research, Summer 2015

Front row: Yunpeng Tang, Andrew Jacobsen, Chenjun Xiao.
Middle row: Jacob Ridgway, Kelly Li, Mohammad Ajallooeian, Kenny Young
Back row: Martin Müller, Ryan Hayward
Photographer: Britta Nielsen

High quality version of image (3.2 MB)

2015 News

Dec 18: Fan passed his PhD defense today. Congratulations!!

Nov 23 - Dec 14: in Austria.
Nov 20: Weifeng passed his MSc exam today. Congratulations!!
Nov 12: Rick and Fan's paper "On the Completeness of Best-First Search Variants that Use Random Exploration" was accepted for AAAI-16. Congratulations!
Nov 12: Our paper on "Factorization Ranking Model for Move Prediction in the Game of Go" has been accepted for AAAI-16. Congratulations Chenjun!
Nov 1+2: In Berkeley for a combinatorial games workshop in honor of Elwyn Berlekamp's 75th birthday.

Sep 1: Welcome Chao Gao, new PhD student co-supervised by Ryan Hayward and myself.

Aug 24 - Sep 5: In Taiwan, visiting Prof. Wu and his group at NCTU, my old friend Prof. Kuo-yuan Kao in Penghu, and the CIG conference in Tainan, where I am giving a keynote about "Computer Go Research - The Challenges Ahead".
Aug 11: Jacob and Andrew present their work at the poster sessions: HIP Poster Session, Thursday 3pm, 2nd floor CSC open area. Undergraduate Summer Research Poster Session, Friday, August 14th, 4:00 - 6:00 pm in CCIS PCL lounge.

Jul 17: Summer research projects are in full swing.
Jul 15: Associate Chair Research news: Preparations for NSERC discovery grants and RTI grants are starting.
Jul 6: Jacob Ridgway is joining us as a HIP student for the next six weeks.
Jul 5: Our computer Hex research group's program MoHex wins Gold in both 11x11 and 13x13 Hex at the Computer Olympiad. Congratulations Ryan!

Jun 15: Yeqin's thesis TDS+: Improving Temperature Discovery Search is now online on the era archive.

May 1: We have a great group of students doing board games research over the summer, including undergrads Andrew Jacobsen and Yunpeng Tang.

Apr 18: Fan Xie is starting an internship at Google Waterloo.
Apr 2: Our paper Continuous Arvand: Motion Planning with Monte Carlo Random Walks has been accepted as full paper for the 3rd ICAPS Workshop on Planning and Robotics (PlanRob 2015). Congratulations Weifeng!
Apr 1: My NSERC Discovery grant got renewed, with a nice increase. So happy!

Feb and Mar: working on a first motion planning paper with Weifeng
Feb 3: 50

Jan 20: Our paper on "Understanding and Improving Local Exploration for GBFS" has been accepted for ICAPS. Congratulations Fan and Rob!
Jan: Yeqin is at AAAI presenting our TDS+ paper and demo-ing Fuego at the Artificial Intelligence Open House.
Jan 5: teaching Cmput 204, Algorithms I, and Cmput 657, Monte Carlo Methods in Games, Planning and Heuristic Search

2014 News

Dec 30: A big heap of work for courses, reviews, papers, and admin. Where is my holiday gone???
Dec 20: Strong new evaluation functions are appearing in computer Go. For my blog, I commented two games between Fuego 1.1 and a program using a strong evaluation function and no search. The evaluation function uses a convolutional neural network.
Dec 17: Yeqin Zhang passed his MSc exam today. Congratulations Yeqin!
Dec: the revived University of Alberta Go club meets Sundays at 2pm in SUB.
Dec 5: Departmental award: Hootan Nakhost received the 2013 PhD Outstanding Thesis Award in Computing Science. Congratulations Hootan!!!

Nov, Dec: working on my courses for next term: Cmput 204 - Algorithms 1 and Cmput 657 - Monte Carlo Methods in Games, Planning and Heuristic Search
Nov 22: welcome back Fan Xie from a very productive internship at IBM Research Ireland.
Nov 8: Our paper on TDS+: Improving Temperature Discovery Search has been accepted for AAAI 2015. Congratulations Yeqin!

Oct: working on my NSERC Discovery grant application.

Sep 18: released version 0.2 of BobNoGo. Updated to current version of Fuego (svn revision 1937) and fixed a bug in the move generation for Monte Carlo simulations.
Sep: working on a paper with Yeqin for AAAI.
Sep 1: Chenjun Xiao joined our group as a new MSc student. Welcome Chenjun!
Sep 1: back from sabbatical. Starting as the Associate Chair Research for our department.

Aug - Nov: Fan Xie is on an internship at IBM Research in Dublin.

July 28: Giving a full-day tutorial on game tree search, together with Kishi, at AAAI in Quebec City.
July 26: On my way to AAAI in Quebec City.

June 6, July 26: updated publications. Added many pdf.
June, July: Working on my NSERC Discovery Grant renewal.
June 17: Our paper on Non-Linear Merging Strategies for Merge-and-Shrink got accepted for SOCS. Congratulations Gaojian!
June 5: Here are the slides from Hootan's CAIAC award presentation at the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence
June 3: dkf, a player and solver for the games Konane and Diskonnect, is now available. It uses MCTS with pure random playouts and the Fuego framework.

May 13-15: Networking at the 2014 GRAND conference in Ottawa.
May 9: Our recent PhD graduate Hootan Nakhost received the CAIAC Dissertation Award for best PhD thesis from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association! Today he gave an invited talk at the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence and was presented with his award. Congratulations Hootan!!!
May: working on my NSERC Discovery Grant application, and finalizing our GRAND Phase 2 proposal.
May 6: My abstract about Fuego has been accepted for the Replaying Japan 2014 conference.
May 6-9: Attending the TRUe Games Workshop on combinatorial games at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.
May 4-23: welcome Steve Kroon, visiting us on his sabbatical from Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
May: Fuego achieved 2 Dan on KGS!
May: Weifeng Chen joined our group as a new MSc student working on algorithms for motion planning as part of a GRAND project. Welcome Weifeng!

April: Mohammad Ajallooeian, PhD student, will work in our group on parallel Monte Carlo search, and I am co-supervising him as part of a GRAND project. Welcome Mohammad!
April 7: Two papers accepted for AAAI-14! Congratulations Fan! See publications.

March 29 - April 17: in Ireland, visiting my first two PhD students Akihiro Kishimoto and Adi Botea at IBM Research near Dublin.
March 21: Two papers accepted for HSDIP, the ICAPS-2014 Workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning. Congratulations Fan!
March 15: at the UEC Cup in Japan. Writing a blog.
March: Westgrid has a pre-event story and a research showcase on MP-Fuego, our massively parallel Go program running on their Hungabee system.

Feb 25: A paper accepted for TCIAIG, the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games. The paper is based on the results of Jiaxing Song's recent MSc thesis and is called "An Enhanced Solver for The Game of Amazons". Congratulations Jiaxing!
February-March: Working hard on a new version of Fuego using learned "feature knowledge".

2013 News

November: working on papers and experiments in planning and games
September: starting sabbatical
June: at ICAPS in Rome
May 27: Michael Buro takes over as the new coach of programming club.
May 16: Hootan Nakhost passed his PhD defense. Congratulations Hootan!
May 15: Hootan's PhD seminar.
May 15: Our Amazons program Arrow2 is doing well in amzn.ch.30.1.1, the top division championship on LittleGolem. Seven wins and only one loss so far.
May 13: Fan Xie passed his candidacy exam. Congratulations Fan!
May 5: Three papers accepted for Computers and Games! See the Publications.
Apr 29: recently updated: Information on solving Amazons on small boards.
Apr 15: recently updated: Project Ideas for combinatorial games and Publications.
Apr 12: Taught in Winter 2013: Cmput 403 - Practical Algorithmics and Cmput 496 - Individual Study.
Apr 10: working hard on papers for Computers and Games.
March 20: Crazy Stone beat Ishida Yoshio on 4 handicap in Densei sen. Zen lost against Ishida.
March 19, 21: giving talks at UEC and Tokyo Tech.
March 17: UEC cup: MP-Fuego prototype finished in a strong 5th place, playing on 1024 cores of Hungabee. In the knockout finals, MP-Fuego won the first game, lost to Zen, then beat two strong opponents - Many Faces and Nomitan. Crazy Stone won the tournament.
March 16-20: at the Sixth UEC Cup and Densei sen (computers vs professional Go players) in Chofu near Tokyo, Japan. Fuego won the Fourth UEC Cup in 2010.
March: Fuego achieved a 1 Dan rank on KGS.
Feb 7: Yeqin Zhang has joined our group as a new MSc student. He will work on algorithms in combinatorial games. Welcome Yeqin!
Feb 4 - 14: Kazuki Yoshizoe is in town for a research visit. Working on parallel df-UCT for Fuego.
Jan 11: Our paper on "Better Quality Search via Randomization and Postprocessing under Time Constraint" got accepted for ICAPS. See Publications.

2012 News

Dec 13: 2013 Compute Canada Resource Allocation Request: my application with Kazuki Yoshizoe has been awarded 100 core years on Hungabee.
Dec 12: Jiaxing Song defended his Masters thesis on "An enhanced solver for the game of Amazons". Congratulations Jiaxing!
November: Graduate student Jiaxing Song has proven 5x6 Amazons to be a first player win. Our Amazons program Arrow2 is playing in the top division on LittleGolem. See the Amazons page and the Arrow2 page.
Oct 26/27: ACM Rocky Mountain Regional Programming Contest. Calgary Phoenix won. Alberta Green in 6th, Gold in 8th place. See results.
Oct 13: ACPC programming competition: Alberta Green and Alberta Gold take Silver and Bronze. Team Lethbridge 1 wins. See problems and results.
Aug 25: Cmput 325 room change. The course will be held in Dentistry/Pharmacy DP 2023, not in Tory.
July 19-21: Attending SOCS 2012 in Niagara Falls.
July 18: Gabe VanEyck passed his MSc defense! Congratulations Gabe!
July 17: Gabe VanEyck had his MSc Thesis Presentation titled "Move Groups as a General Enhancement for Monte Carlo Tree Search". See the announcement.
June 18: Updated the local Fuego webpages with information about the WCCI 2012 events in Brisbane last week, as well as Barcelona 2010.
June 12: (updated June 22: corrected opponent for 9x9 game, more links) Fuego won a 9x9 Go game today, taking Black against Shang-Rong Tsai, 6 Dan amateur. Komi was 7 points. The game was very close and looked like it could be jigo (tie), but move 32 was a mistake by the human.
Fuego also won a 19x19 game with only 2 stones handicap against Sheng-Shu Chang 6 Dan amateur.

Fuego played Mr. Chou Chun-Hsun, 9 Dan professional on the 13x13 board (no handicap, no komi) and 19x19 (6 handicap), but lost both of these games badly.
- Replay the games
These games were held as part of the Human vs Computer Go Competition @IEEE WCCI 2012. Many other programs also played. Zen won a 4 handicap stone game
June 6: working on a Fuego 2.0 release. Still some bugs to iron out.
June 6: updated the publications page with our recent papers at ICAPS, SOCS, ECAI.
June 3: Fuego played in the strong 83rd KGS Computer Go Tournament
June 1: Sumudu Fernando started work as a short-term programmer analyst in my group, filling in for Saradha.
May 18 - 23: in Reykjavik, Iceland for Hilmar Finnson's PhD defense.
May 17: ACM ICPC World finals were held in Warsaw, Poland. 112 teams of 3 students each competed in solving 12 tough programming problems. Like last year, our team consisted of Saber Khakpash, Amir Malekzadeh, and Navid Zolghadr, with Sumudu Fernando and myself as coaches. Piotr Rudnicki also joined us for world finals in his home country. The problem set was quite tough this year. Our team achieved in 36th place (shared by all teams with 4 solved).
Some links: Summary of results, Detailed scoreboard, Problem set, Team photos.
May 16: ACM ICPC: Navid's program took 2nd place in the ICPC challenge. facebook page, video 1, video 2.
May 2-4: In Montreal for GRAND conference.
May 1: Colin Hunt is starting as a NSERC USRA summer student.
Apr 29: Saradha's last day. She is moving to Europe with her husband who has a position at CERN.
Feb 28: I was interviewed about Computer Go by David Ormerod for Go Game Guru.
Upcoming: ACM ICPC: team Alberta Black will attend The University of Chicago Invitational Programming Contest 2012 before going to World Finals in Warsaw.
Visitor February 22 - March 19: Akihiro Kishimoto, Assistant Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology, a graduate from our dept. and my first PhD student.
Jan 14: The shogi program Bonkras (which stands for Bonanza cluster) beat the former top professional Yonenaga in an official match. See the Japan Times report, or replay the game (Bonkras moves first and its pieces are at the lower side of the board).
Jan 13-18: John Tromp is playing computer Go program Zen in a best of five match.
Visitor January 12 to February 24: Kunihito Hoki, Assistant Professor at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, author of the leading shogi program Bonanza, and inventor of the "Bonanza method" for parameter tuning which is used in all strong shogi programs now.

2011

Dec 6: It's official: Our team Alberta Black is going to the ACM ICPC World Finals in Warsaw, Poland!
Dec 6: teaching next term: Cmput 403 - Practical Algorithmics.
Dec 6: Some pages on NoGo.
Dec 6: The Go program Erica, written by our Postdoc Aja Huang, made it to the final game of the 5th UEC cup! Zen won the event. Things did not go well for Fuego this year, with one game lost by network problems and another by an operator error.
Nov 18-26: Lots of medals for UofA programs at the Olympiad! Gold in Hex, Havannah and NoGo. Silver in Hex and NoGo. Bronze in 9x9 Go and Amazons. Fuego also took 4th in 13x13 Go and 5th in 19x19.
Nov 12: Getting ready for the Computer Olympiad in Tilburg, Netherlands. UofA will have entries for Hex, Go, Havannah, Amazons, and NoGo.
Nov 12: At the 2011 TAAI computer Go competitions, Fuego takes second place behind Zen in all three events: 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19. See blog entries for the first day and second day.
Oct 29: Team Alberta Black with Saber Khakpash, Amir Malekzadeh and Navid Zolghadr won the Rocky Mountain regonals in Edmonton, with 9 out of 10 problems solved!
Oct 15: Team Alberta Black with Saber Khakpash, Amir Malekzadeh and Navid Zolghadr won the 2011 ACPC, with 8 out of 9 problems solved!
Oct 8: Two of our papers, one on move groups and one on blunder cost, got accepted for Advances in Computer Games 13. See Publications.
Sep 9: Abdallah Saffidine, PhD student from Université Paris Dauphine, has joined us for one year as a visiting student.
Sep 1: Hilmar Finnsson, PhD student from University of Reykjavik, is visiting our group for three months.
Kirk Kroeker's article about computer Go in the Communications of the ACM, with interviews of Olivier Teytaud of the MoGo team and myself.
Teaching in Fall 2011: Cmput 201 (Intro to C, Linux) and Cmput 655 (Grad course on game tree search)
Kazuki Yoshizoe, Assistant Professor from University of Tokyo, is visiting our group again from August 19 to October 21.
Aug 1: Tomoyuki Kaneko, Assistant Professor from University of Tokyo, author of the top shogi program GPS shogi is visiting our group for two months.
Aug 1: Aja Huang, author of the top Go program Erica, started his work as a postdoc in our group, co-supervised by Ryan Hayward and myself.
July 11: Results of the IPC planning competition. Arvand did well in sequential satisficing planning, and ArvandHerd won the multicore competition!
July 10: Some of my recent talks on planning and on Monte Carlo tree search in games.
June 2011: I spent a month visiting Tristan Cazenave's group at Paris Dauphine.
Attending ICAPS 2011 in Freiburg.
Our weekly Monte Carlo and game tree search meetings: Friday 1-2pm, now in CSC 3-33. Everybody is welcome!
March 14: The 9x9 match of Ohashi 5 Dan professional against the four Go programs Aya, Erica, MyGoFriend and Fuego was postponed because of the catastrophe in Japan.
Feb 28: Kazuki Yoshizoe, Assistant Professor from University of Tokyo, is visiting our group from February 28th to May 2nd.
Saradha Sankaran started her work as a programmer/analyst in our group.
Because of the unstable situation in Egypt, ACM ICPC World Finals were postponed and moved to Florida.
MSc student Fan Xie won the human NoGo competition at BIRS. The two Fuego-based NoGo programs by Bob Hearn and Fan Xie took first and second place in the computer competition, ahead of several other programs by well-known researchers.
Jan 9 - 14: Attending the BIRS Combinatorial Game Theory workshop
Teaching Winter 2011: Cmput 201 and Cmput 605
Fuego won the 4th UEC cup, this year's largest computer Go competition.
My blog, Martin's Computer Go Adventures

2010

Teaching Fall 2010: Cmput 201
Our programming team Alberta 1 with Saber Khakpash, Amir Malekzadeh and Navid Zolghadr convincingly won the 2010 RMRC and qualified for the ACM ICPC world finals! Also see the news article.
October 16, 2010: Our programming team Alberta 1 with Saber Khakpash, Amir Malekzadeh and Navid Zolghadr convincingly won the 2010 ACPC. Also see the news article.
Feb 12 - 25: research visit by Akihiro Kishimoto, "Kishi".
Feb 12: Our paper on plan improvement was accepted for ICAPS 2010!
Feb 5: ACM-ICPC World finals in Harbin, China. Shanghai Jiaotong won. Unfortunately our team only got honorable mention. See results.
Jan 10: Fuego won the January 2010 KGS Computer Go Tournament with 16 wins out of 18, ahead of Zen (!) and pachi.
Jan 6: restarted group meetings: each Friday, 1-2pm, CSC 349. Everybody welcome! Send me email to get on the announcement list.
Jan 5, 2010: teaching this term:
- CMPUT 201 - Practical Programming Methodology
- CMPUT 403 - Practical Algorithmics
- CMPUT 655 - Traditional and Recent Techniques for Two-Player Games.

2009

Nov 8: Fuego won the Fifty-third KGS Computer Go Tournament with 9 wins out of 10, ahead of Mogo and Many Faces. You can read Nick Wedd's report.
Oct 31: Our two Alberta teams came 1st and 5th in the ACM Rocky Mountain regional contest in Saskatoon.
Oct 17: Our team Alberta 1 won the 7th ACPC Alberta Collegiate Programming Contest by 4 minutes over Calgary 1! Stanford 1 won the guest event with 9 out of 10 problems solved, ahead of UBC and Waterloo.
Aug 22: At the Human vs. Computer Program Competition (FUZZ-IEEE 2009) Event held August 21-22 on Jeju Island, Korea, Fuego won a game of 9x9 Go against the top-rank (9 Dan) professional player Zhou Junxun (his name is also transliterated as Chou Chun-Hsun). It is the first time that a computer program has won a 9x9 game on even against a top-ranked player, so this represents a milestone for Computer Go.
Replay the game here
May 2009: Our Go program Fuego won Gold and Silver at the Computer Olympiad 2009 in Pamplona, Spain! See the 9x9 and 19x19 results and the report in the Department news
Teaching in Winter 2009: CMPUT 201 and 655

2008

Oct 2008: Our programming team won the Rocky Mountain regionals, and went to the world finals in Stockholm! See the UofA Expressnews report.

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Created: Mar 30, 2011

Martin Müller