Intelligent Go Board
2010/07/01
In 2003, we built a prototype 8x8 board which records Go moves during normal play, thus ensuring that a full game record is available for each game. No special stones are necessary, no holes need to be drilled through the board - it is a nice example for Ubiquituous/Pervasive Computing. The technology used then was a capacitive matrix array, now made famous by its use in the iPhone and Android mobile phones - it's the technology that made multi-touch possible. Demonstration available upon request.
In 2006, we presented this project at the Idea Generation workshop, and four students created a business proposal for it. The gist was that Europe would be too small to even recoup developmental costs and we would have to go to Asia. This was too far without reliable partners.
2006/07 we also did some research on recovering the Go board state from still images with Image Mining and Machine Learning techniques. Possibly we'll make a mobile phone App out of this some day.