icgaThe ICGA World Chess Championship is underway – that’s the International Computer Games Association.  The ICGA is interested in AI in games, namely in how computers can beat humans. While the ICGA was once interested only in Chess (and called the ICCA), it slowly branched out to other classic abstracts, such as Go, Shogi, Hex, Twixt, and so on (changing its name in 2002).

Apparently, we’re best off keeping the computers at the computer-only events. Over at the Bulgarian M-Tel Masters tournament, the Mayor of Sofia sat down to play and, while waiting for the grandmasters who were delayed by a traffic jam, jokingly opened with two simultaneous moves. This so irked the computer software recording the moves, that the computer shut down and wouldn’t agree to play for the rest of the day. (source)