Learning from Games and Contests

Dear Colleagues,

Games, contests, puzzles, etc. form an integral part of many peoples’ lives around the world. Advances in technology are also often linked to the analysis of these forms of entertainment. For example, some breakthroughs in AI have been made in conjunction with the development of IBM’s Watson and its ability to play the gameshow Jeopardy. Another more recent example is that of DeepMind’s AlphaGo and its learned ability to defeat world-champion Go players. In these cases and others, media attention to the areas of probability, statistics, machine learning, information theory, etc. has surpassed attention given for other advances of a similar depth that have more technical applications. In other words, technical fields gain significant notoriety when advances are coupled with applications that hold interest for the general public.

This Special Issue calls for the submission of contributions that apply the tools of information theory, probability, statistics, machine learning, game theory, graph theory, artificial intelligence, etc. to applications that involve the playing of games. Papers that analyze games from a technical point of view are welcome. Contributions that seek to give humans a competitive advantage during contests are also appropriate. Papers must exhibit significant technical content related to the scope of Entropy; that is, papers that take an information-theoretic approach using entropy, mutual information, etc. are of greatest value to this Special Issue. Applications of interest include games such as chess and Go, online games such as Wordle, and contests such as those found in the areas of sports, politics, etc. We also welcome other creative applications in this domain.

This Special Issue further seeks to provide a mechanism by which creative works in information theory for nonconventional applications might be published in a meaningful venue. Papers published in this Special Issue will help us learn from the games we play.

Dr. Willie Harrison
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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