ACG 2021 conference report

Abstract

The 17 th Advances in Computer Games conference (ACG 2021) was held online in 2021 for the first time in its 47 year history, due to the COVID pandemic and resulting travel restrictions. The conference took place during 23–25 November 2021. The Advances in Computer Games conference series is a major international forum for researchers and developers interested in all aspects of artificial intelligence and computer game playing. Earlier conferences took place in London (1975), Edinburgh (1978), London (1981, 1984), Noordwijker-hout (1987), London (1990), Maastricht (1993, 1996), Paderborn (1999), Graz (2003), Taipei (2005), Pamplona (2009), Tilburg (2011), Leiden (2015, 2017) and Macao (2019). For the past 20 years, the conference has been held every second year, alternating with the Computer and Games conference. A total of 34 papers were submitted to this conference. One was later withdrawn and the remaining 33 papers were each reviewed by three reviewers. A total of 22 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings, to be published by Springer in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. The online nature of this year’s conference offered some benefits in that conference registration could be made free for the first time, resulting in a record participation for this event with 399 registered participants. The attendance figures for the sessions peaked at around 100 viewees at any given time. Another benefit is that all talks were recorded and are available online. We would like to thank Dr Nicolás Arnáez from the University of Alberta’s AI4Society initiative for setting up the conference’s Zoom stream – which ran without incident throughout – and for preparing the presentation videos. running the conference online to devise a schedule