Yngvi Björnsson

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Yngvi Björnsson, an Icelandic computer scientist and games researcher. After a B.S in Computer Science at the University of Iceland, and a few years in the industry (1988-1994), Yngvi studied at the University of Alberta in Canada. As member of the Games research group, he co-authored the chess program The Turk along with Andreas Junghanns, which competed at the WMCCC 1996 in Jakarta , developed the Lines of Action program and three times gold medal winner YL, co-authored the Hex program Mongoose and made his Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science, Selective Depth-First Game-Tree Search at the University of Alberta in 2002 advised by Professor Tony Marsland. Yngvi contributed with Uncertainty Cut-Offs, and invented Multi-Cut Pruning.

Since 2004, Yngvi Björnsson is associate professor at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavík University, Iceland. He served as Vice-President of the ICGA from 2005 until 2011 and organized the WCCC 2005 in Reykjavík.

=Chinook= Yngvi Björnsson was member of the Chinook team around Jonathan Schaeffer, solving Checkers : Yngvi’s major contribution to the project was with the Chinook endgame databases. His research interests include heuristic search in artificial intelligence.

=General Game Playing= Yngvi Björnsson is involved in the successful development of the General Game Playing program Cadiaplayer from Reykjavik University, which won the General Game Playing world-champion in 2007 and 2008.

=Selected Publications=

1996 ...

 * Yngvi Björnsson, Mark Brockington, Andreas Junghanns, Aske Plaat (1996). Report on the Advances in Computer Chess 8 Conference. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3 » Advances in Computer Chess 8
 * Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson. (1997). From MiniMax to Manhattan. In Deep Blue Versus Kasparov: The Significance for Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Workshop 1997. pdf
 * Andreas Junghanns, Jonathan Schaeffer, Mark Brockington, Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1997). Diminishing Returns for Additional Search in Chess. Advances in Computer Chess 8, pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, Andreas Junghanns (1997). Searching with Uncertainty Cut-offs. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, pdf preprint
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, Andreas Junghanns (1997). Searching with Uncertainty Cut-offs. Advances in Computer Chess 8
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1998). Risk Management in Game-tree Pruning. Technical Report TR 98-07, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1998). Multi-cut Pruning in Alpha-Beta Search. CG 1998, see also MC2001 for an expanded version.

2000 ...
2001 2002 2003 2004
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2000). Risk Management in Game-tree Pruning. Information Sciences, 122(1):23–41, 2000. pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson (2000). YL wins Lines of Action Tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3 » 5th Computer Olympiad
 * Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson (2000). From Minimax to Manhattan. in Jaap van den Herik, Hiroyuki Iida (eds.) (2000). Games in AI Research. Universiteit Maastricht
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2000). Selective Depth-First Search Methods. in Jaap van den Herik, Hiroyuki Iida (eds.) (2000). Games in AI Research. Universiteit Maastricht, pdf preprint
 * Darse Billings, Yngvi Björnsson (2000). Mona and YL’s Lines of Action LOA Page
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2001). Learning Search Control in Adversary Games. Advances in Computer Games 9, pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2001). Multi-cut Alpha-Beta Pruning in Game Tree Search. Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 252, pdf
 * Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson (2001). Variable-Depth Search. Advances in Computer Games 9, pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Mark Winands (2001). YL wins Lines of Action tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3 » 6th Computer Olympiad
 * Yngvi Björnsson (2002). Selective Depth-First Game-Tree Search. Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2002). Learning Control of Search Extensions. Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Information Sciences (JCIS 2002), pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Mark Winands (2002). YL wins Lines of Action tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3 » 7th Computer Olympiad
 * Darse Billings, Yngvi Björnsson (2003). Search and Knowledge in Lines of Action. Advances in Computer Games 10, pdf
 * Ryan Hayward, Yngvi Björnsson, Michael Johanson, Morgan Kan, Nathan Po, Jack van Rijswijck (2003). Solving 7x7 Hex: Virtual Connections and Game-state Reduction. Advances in Computer Games 10, pdf
 * Jonathan Schaeffer, Yngvi Björnsson, Neil Burch, Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Steve Sutphen (2003). Building the Checkers 10-Piece Endgame Databases. Advances in Computer Games 10
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Vignir Hafsteinsson, Ársæll Jóhannsson, Einar Jónsson (2004). Efficient Use of Reinforcement Learning in a Computer Game. in Computer Games: Artificial Intellignece, Design and Education (CGAIDE'04), pdf
 * Jan Willemson, Yngvi Björnsson (2004). Six wins Hex tournament. ICGA Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3 » 9th Computer Olympiad

2005 ...
2006 2007 2008 2009
 * Ryan Hayward, Yngvi Björnsson, Michael Johanson, Morgan Kan, Nathan Po, Jack van Rijswijck (2005). Solving 7x7 Hex with domination, fill-in, and virtual connections. Theoretical Computer Science, 349(2):123–139, 2005. pdf
 * Jonathan Schaeffer, Yngvi Björnsson, Neil Burch, Akihiro Kishimoto, Martin Müller, Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Steve Sutphen (2005). Solving Checkers. IJCAI 2005, pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Markus Enzenberger, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer (2005). Fringe Search: Beating A* at Pathfinding on Game Maps. pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Jonathan Schaeffer, Nathan Sturtevant (2005). Partial Information Endgame Databases. Advances in Computer Games 11, pdf, pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Jaap van den Herik (2005). The 13th World Computer-Chess Championship. ICGA Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3 » WCCC 2005
 * Yngvi Björnsson (2005). Report on the 13th World Computer Chess Championship. BNVKI Newsletter, October 2005, pdf
 * Jaap van den Herik, Yngvi Björnsson, Nathan S. Netanyahu (eds.) (2006). Computers and Games: 4th International Conference. CG 2004
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Ryan Hayward, Michael Johanson, Jack van Rijswijck (2006). Dead Cell Analysis in Hex and the Shannon Game. In Graph Theory in Paris: Proceedings of a Conference in Memory of Claude Berge (CT'04 Paris), zipped ps
 * Sverrir Sigmundarson, Yngvi Björnsson. (2006). Value Back-Propagation vs. Backtracking in Real-Time Search. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Workshop on Learning For Search, AAAI Press, pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Jónheiður Ísleifsdóttir (2006). Tools for debugging large game trees. 11th Game Programming Workshop, Hakone, Japan
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Jónheiður Ísleifsdóttir (2007). GTQL: A Query Language for Game Trees. CGW 2007
 * Vadim Bulitko, Yngvi Björnsson, Mitja Luvstrek, Jonathan Schaeffer, Sverrir Sigmundarson (2007). Dynamic Control in Path-Planning with Real-Time Heuristic Search. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS'07), September 22-26, Providence, RI, USA, 2007. pdf
 * Jonathan Schaeffer, Neil Burch, Yngvi Björnsson, Akihiro Kishimoto, Martin Müller, Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Steve Sutphen (2007). Checkers is Solved. Science, Vol. 317, no. 5844
 * Hilmar Finnsson, Yngvi Björnsson. (2008). Simulation-Based Approach to General Game Playing. In The Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, 2008. Accepted. pdf, pdf
 * Mark Winands, Yngvi Björnsson. (2008). Enhanced Realization Probability Search. New Mathematics and Natural Computation, Vol. 3, No. 6
 * Mark Winands, Yngvi Björnsson, Jahn-Takeshi Saito (2008). Monte-Carlo Tree Search Solver. CG 2008, pdf
 * Jónheiður Ísleifsdóttir, Yngvi Björnsson. (2008). GTQ: A Language and Tool for Game-Tree Analysis. CG 2008, pdf
 * Mark Winands, Yngvi Björnsson (2009). Evaluation Function Based Monte-Carlo LOA. pdf
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Vadim Bulitko, Nathan Sturtevant (2009). TBA*: Time-Bounded A*. IJCAI 2009, pdf

2010 ...

 * Pálmi Skowronski, Yngvi Björnsson, Mark Winands (2010). Automated Discovery of Search-Extension Features. Advances in Computer Games 12, pdf
 * Nathan Sturtevant, Vadim Bulitko, Yngvi Björnsson (2010). On Learning In Agent-Centered Search. AAMAS 2010. pdf
 * Mark Winands, Yngvi Björnsson, Jahn-Takeshi Saito (2010). Monte Carlo Tree Search in Lines of Action. Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Vol. 2, No. 4
 * Yngvi Björnsson, Stephan Schiffel (2013). Comparison of GDL Reasoners. IJCAI 2013
 * Tristan Cazenave, Mark Winands, Yngvi Björnsson (eds.) (2014). Computer Games. ECAI CGW 2014

=External Links=
 * Yngvi Björnsson's homepage
 * Yngvi Björnsson's ICGA Tournaments
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Yngvi Bjornsson

=References=

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