On the behalf of the organizing committee, I am very glad and very honored to welcome you to the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG'09). After nine months of preparation, we are finally here, at the Politecnico di Milano, for the fifth edition of the symposium that brings together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss recent advances and to explore future directions in this exciting field.

We tried to put together an exciting program, which I hope you will enjoy.

We have four keynotes: Yngvi Björnsson from Reykjavik University, Stefano Lecchi from Milestone, David Stern and Joaquin Quiñonero Candela from Microsoft Research, and Michael Mateas from UC Santa Cruz.

We have two introductory tutorials. The first one by Kenneth O. Stanley, from the University of Central Florida, provides an introduction to neuro-evolution for videogames. The second one by James Vaccaro, from Lockheed Martin, discusses the modeling and the simulation of real urban and board games for training players.

In addition, we have six exciting competitions including the second edition of the 2K botprize competition, involving human and artificial players competing in Unreal Tournament 2004, the first Defcon competition, two competitions related to Ms Pac-Man, the simulated car racing competition, and the Super Mario competition.

And of course, we have the authors’ presentations. We received 76 papers from all over the world. All the papers were peer reviewed by at least three experts from the field to ensure the quality of the symposium. 52 papers were accepted for presentation and publication in the proceedings.

I hope that you will enjoy the symposium and your staying in Milan.

Pier Luca Lanzi, Chair
Politecnico di Milano