Hello everybody,

```
at the pivot, where June and July meet, the Computer Olympaid 2016
will take place in Leiden (NL). Many games will be played, including
Go on boards of several sizes, Shogi, Amazons, Hex, Havannah(?) Breakthrough, Connect6, Ewn, ...

```
Hopefully also "Last Man Forward" (on 10x10 board) and also Frisbee Go simulation will find some programmers.

```
In between, the conference "Computers and Games (CG 2016)" takes place, in
the mornings of June 29, June 30, July 01. Deadline for submission of
papers (8-10 pages) is Februay 01, 2016. Authors will be informed early
in March if they got good reviews and have been accepted.

I want to encourage all of you to submit interesting papers.

Some more details are here:
https://cg2016leiden.wordpress.com/

Publication of the proceedings in the Springer Lecture Notes
Series (LNCS/LNAI) is expected.

```
Ingo (tired and retired from playing LastPost games).

```

Hi Ingo,

Why is there a question mark regarding Havannah?

christian

By the way, what is the starting position for the 10x10 game?

@Christian: Havannah will only be played if at least two programs show up. Last year (2015) there were none.

@William: “Last Man Forward” on 10x10 can have either 7 or 9 or 11 (or 13 ?!) pieces for each side, You fill two diagonals with them. So, for 7 you have in the lower left corner:

x . . . . .

x x . . . . . .

. x x . . . . .

. . x x . . . . . .

\\\*************************

For 9 pieces you have

x . . . . . . .

x x . . . . . . .

. x x . . . . . .

. . x x . . . . . .

. . . x x . . . . .

\\\***************************

We should play the smallest size where the game is not solved.

10x10 board has the advantage for the spectators that we can use draught boards.

Ingo.

I believe I signed up for Havannah last year but there were no other takers. That said, I may just stick with Amazons and Breakthrough this year.

What are the rules of time control? Are there any restrictions on computers (e.g. can they have an internet connection)?

The World Computer Chess Championship has its own set of rules and time controls. The other games typically have time controls on the order of 30 minutes per game or 30 secs per move, the idea being that a game can be finished in an  hour or less.

Internet connections are allowed. My personal opinion on this is that it makes sense for some of the high profile games like go and its different sizes, and maybe even hex. But allowing it in the non prime-time games can give a huge advantage to competitors with access to powerful machines. Maybe I'm just being a dinosaur here, but I miss the days when we would show up with our own machines which would typically be not that different for each other, set them up next to each other, play one against the other, and compare programming and algorithmic ideas as we watched our babies compete. In any case, the competitions are always a great deal of fun and the opportunity to talk to others doing the same kind of work and to compare/share ideas is really quite a joy.