Robotic go: Exploring a different perspective on human-computer interaction with the game of go

The advent of computers and the World Wide Web diversified the way in which the game of Go is played. While traditional human-to-human play still remains an important form of game play, amateur players, along with some professional players, have shifted the play domain from “off-line” club houses to “on-line” Go servers. Computer Go is an important field of study to develop a software to play Go or a Go engine. In addition to human-to-human play, a Go engine or computer intelligence to play Go adds another axis to play configuration: human-to-computer play and computer-to-computer play. These revolutions in the game of Go happened in an extremely short period of time compared to the history of the game, which is more than 4,000 years. We summarize this unavoidable change for the first time in the literature, to our knowledge, and propose a novel way to interact with the current technological advances. We present the new Human-Machine-Computer-Network Interface concept and our implementation of the machine interface with a robot arm. This Lynxmotion robotic arm named Cheonsoo-I successfully places stones on a board under the proposed architecture.