First competition section paper published

About a year ago, a brief editorial announced the establishment of the Competition Section of AIJ, which is intended for the publication of reports on competitions between AI systems. This volume features the first such report concerning the Second International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2011). The focus was on practical bilateral multiissue negotiations where agents had no information about the opponents’ strategies or preferences. Besides describing the participating systems, the negotiation scenarios, and the results of the tournament, the paper also provides an in-depth analysis of the strategies and techniques used by the participants. Among other things, empirical game theory is used to investigate the robustness of strategies. In short, the paper is an excellent example of the kinds of reports we would like to see published in the Competition Section, providing deep insights into the state of the art of a particular kind of AI systems, from which lessons for future developments can be learned. Needless to say we would like to see more such papers in the coming months and years!