CadiaPlayer Strikes Again

About a year ago, CADIAPlayer, developed by Yngvi Björnsson and his MSc student Hilmar Finsson within CADIA, our centre for AI research, won the General Game Playing (GPP) competition at AAAI 2007. (The aim of the GGP competitions is to help develop systems that can accept a formal description of an arbitrary game and, without further human interaction, can play the game effectively.)

I am happy to report that, in a repeat of last year's final, CadiaPlayer confirmed its world-champion status in GGP at AAAI 2008 in Chicago by defeating ClunePlayer from the University of California, Los Angeles. (ClunePlayer has now been runner-up for three years in a row, and was the world champion in 2005.)

This is great news for Icelandic Computer Science as a whole and, more specifically, for the School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University. Congrats to Yngvi, Hilmar and Gylfi.