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IJCAI-97: A Road to GO and Robot Soccer, Next AI's Challenges to Chess

A robot soccer competition and intelligent game playing computers will demonstrate international advances in artificial intelligence research at a conference in Nagoya, Japan this summer.

Recently, Kasparov was defeated by "Deep Blue", a chess playing computer developed by IBM. The goals of giving computers abilities surpassing humans and defeating the world chess champion have been major challenges in artificial intelligence (AI) research.

The 15th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97) will feature research presentations and exhibitions, The World Cup Robot Soccer Competition (RoboCup-97), The Third FOST CUP World Open Computer Go Championship (FOST Cup), and "New World Expo" demonstrating future uses of AI in daily life.

Jointly sponsored by The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence Society, this biennial conference is said to be the best AI research conference in the world.

IJCAI-97 will focus on research themes in AI, network agents, multi agents, intelligent robots, intelligent life, evolution of agents, games, amusement, and entertainment. Presentations will focus on these nine challenging issues of AI research for their rapid promotion over the next few years.

Now that chess is nearing its end as a task for AI, the world is seeking the next challenge. Strong candidates are the game of Go and computer playing robots.

Like chess, Go is played on a board by two players, but the variety of moves is greater. In a Go game, the present chess program is no match for man.

Unlike chess or go, soccer is a game in which many players are playing against each other and all are moving together. Also unlike board games, judgments for soccer must be made based on information from outside the field of vision with rapidly changing variables.

Although powerful game playing computers and programs such as "Deep Blue" may serve no direct purpose for everyone. Their were sceptics of the Apollo plan to send man to the moon which, in fact, contributed enormously to the advance of science and technology over time.

For more information contact:

Koichi Furukawa, Keio University
IJCAI-97 Local Arrangements Committee, Chair
E-mail: furukawa@sfc.keio.ac.jp
Fax: +81-466-47-5350

Hitoshi Matsubara, Electrotechnical Laboratory
IJCAI-97 Pubilic Relations
E-mail: matsubara@etl.go.jp
Fax: +81-298-58-5918

IJCAI-97 Liaison Office
Shuwa Kioicho Park Bldg. 1F
Kioicho 3-6, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102 Japan
Tel: +81-3-3234-2361 Fax: +81-3-3234-4456
E-mail: procom3@twics.com

The New Millennium Remote Agent follows the Mars Pathfinder

At IJCAI-97, Nicola Muscettola, P. Pandurang Nayak, Barney Pell and Brian C. Williams (NASA Ames Research Center) will give an invited talk on "The New Millennium Remote Agent: To Boldly Go Where No AI System Has Gone Before"

The abstrast of the talk is as follows:

The New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) is an autonomous spacecraft control system being developed jointly by NASA Ames and JPL. It integrates constraint-based planning and scheduling, robust multi-threaded execution, model-based diagnosis and reconfiguration, and real-time monitoring and control. NMRA will control Deep Space One (DS-1), the first flight of NASA's New Millennium Program (NMP), which will launch in 1998. As the first AI system to autonomously control an actual spacecraft, NMRA will enable the establishment of a "virtual presence" in space through an armada of intelligent space probes that autonomously explore the nooks and crannies of the solar system.
higuchi@etl.go.jp
Last modified: Tue Jul 8 16:01:32 1997