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 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.

University of Alberta

Computing Science