Research Description

Dr. Zhang and I will be focusing on the Asian board game Go (also commonly known as Weiqi or Baduk). The game of Go has ancient roots in Chinese culture. It has since spawned variants in Japan and Korea, and has gained traction all over the world as a great intellectual challenge. Two players take turns placing back and white stones on a board, attempting to surround as much territory as possible. Though its rules are quite simple to grasp, mastering the strategies and techniques of the game is a life-long endeavor.For more information about the board game , click here.

Our research focused on creating a novel interface for visualizing the game of Go, the last major board game in which artificial intelligence is still unable to beat high-level human players. Computer Go is an intense area of computer science research that has spurred new applications of hashing techniques, search algorithms, and machine learning. An important skill for human Go players is the ability to visualize sequences of play. Our paper presents a novel method of visualizing the Go board. We hope to analyze the ways in which players interact with our new interface design. In addition to improving the skill levels of Go players, analysis of the data collected may provide insight on the way that human players analyze boards, recognize patterns, and decide on moves. These insights may be used to refine evaluation heuristics used in Go playing artificial intelligence

Due to the sensitive nature of our research topic, I have not included the full research paper on this site. If you are interested in our research, and would like to view the paper, please contact me at hackettm [at] cs [dot] unc [dot] edu.