> I am now seeking some good textbooks for computer-go course in my university > for undergraduates. I hope I can get some advice from this mailing list, > thank you all!
I'm not currently in teaching, but I'd be interested to hear about uses of computer-go in this context, ie, not so much as a specialist course but as a focus for programming and group projects. I looked into this some years ago but, before the recent successes with Monte-Carlo based approaches, it wasn't promising. Interesting, yes, open scope for advanced students, yes, but too much rope for the average student, and too far to go before reaching real achievements. Difficult to motivate, both for students and non-Go colleagues, and highly risky for the majority of students. This has probably all changed now. The recent reference bot discussions show that competent programmers can port an example implementation easily, or re-implement it from scratch given a suitable specification. With the usual accounting for experienced programmers vs learners, easy/quickly becomes reachable given sufficient time and support, but that is still substantial progress: one can actually expect a majority of student( team)s to create a working bot (that plays better than random legal moves) by the end of a course. At which point motivation will be high and contagious and, even if the student bots might not be the fastest or bug-free in absolute terms, they could compete against each other. And there is no end of useful experience to draw from a computer-go related project: algorithms and datastructures (with lots of datastructure variants applicable within one bot), profiling, performance (switching representations, eliminating structure to gain performance without losing testability/debuggability, estimating complexity and seeing it make a real impact), presentation/gui, communication, game servers, protocols, non- sequential and distributed programming, .. Btw, one can water down the topic slightly, aiming for computer assistance rather than computer play, which lowers the barriers for success, and gives more students a chance to find an interesting, achievable, and rewarding topic to work on in the overall setting. That also allows for small parcels of work (guis, influence/territorry estimate visualisation, move/move area prediction [which program comes closest most often], game commentary generation [can your program tell what a move is about, or turn estimates into commentary], statistics/knowledge extraction from game databases, life&death problems, interactive tutorials, ..), some of which might be integrated into tool suites later (raising interface and integration issues). In brief, all the computer-go resarch topics, but presented in small enough, manageable, problem sets, not expecting perfect results, but focussing on interesting and rewarding paths. Or is that still too optimistic?-) |I am not aware of a book that would cover modern go-programming |techniques (ie Monte-Carlo). | |You'll find plenty of ressources in the Computer-go bibliography: |http://www.citeulike.org/group/5884/library Great resource, but not easy to use (too many tags, too little structure). Is there/should there be a web page/url tag in the computer-go bibliography, for resources like wikis <http://senseis.xmp.net/>, game servers, url collections, and reference bots? The bibliography could be the single entry point for computer-go. The survey tag gives a useful starting point in 2001/2002 http://www.citeulike.org/group/5884/tag/survey then working backwards from today trying to find the most influential ideas/tags/search terms, cross-checking with the mailing list archives.. http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go A lot of work before you can get a course started.. Claus PS. I notice that not all postings come with the list url footer, and not all email clients know how to present the List-Archive header. Also, the "About computer-go" section in the mailman page http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ ought to mention/link to the computer-go bibliography. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
