Preface for the special issue on Games and AI

kEver since humans achieved some degree of civilization, they have played games. The two most important reasons for games to be played are their intellectual challenge and their entertainment value. For the rst reason games are used as a testing ground for computational intelligence. Since the 1950s the AI community compares the computer performance with the human performance (Schaeer, 2001), or otherwise stated: since the birth of AI computational intelligence is measured with respect to human intelligence. Shannon (1950) and Turing (1953) were the rst to describe a chess-playing program, while Samuel (1959) wrote the rst game-playing program in the domain of Checkers. In the beginning most AI research in games concentrated on