Call for papers: Journal of Go Studies 2023 2nd Issue

/April 18, 2023

Call for Papers: Rethinking Go
in the Age of AI


Journal of Go Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2023)
Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Go Studies: Bae lncheol


Journal of Go Studies is a bi-annual academic journal established in 2023, with volumes advancing a critical analysis of Go.  It is a refereed publication that seeks collaboration among all Go communities around the world. The website for the journal is at http://intergostudies.net/.

Journal of Go Studies invites submissions of papers for the 2nd Issue of Volume 17 (publication date: 2023) under the theme of ‘Rethinking Go in the Age of AI’.

Over the past few months, the field of artificial intelligence has seen rapid growth, with wave after wave of new models like GPT-4 and Dall-E emerging one after another. Every week brings the promise of new and exciting models, products, and tools. It’s easy to get swept up in the waves of hype, but the current 'futurist narrative' is no stranger to the world, especially to Go community. While some view a technological singularity as a positive development, others believe it could be disastrous, leading to a dystopian future. Increasingly powerful algorithms, such as chat-bots with human-seeming capabilities, are changing the world. What does the future hold?.

With the sudden advent of AlphaGo, the DeepMind's go-playing system in 2016, the world of Go has already undergone a radical transformation. While lacking an obvious commercial application, we know that Go has uniquely relevant challenges of cognitive and reasoning capabilities. It is so well recognized that those challenges make Go useful benchmarks of AI progress. But what is AlphaGo's legacy? The answer of how the go-bot(the descendant of AlphaGo) came to have such competence is beginning to come into focus. The way of improving its play is to play thousands of games against itself, making minor exploratory mutations in them all, evaluating which are progress, and using those evaluations to adjust the further rounds of practice games. It is just another level of generate and test, in a game that could hardly be more abstract and insulated from real-world noise and its attendant concerns.

However, there remain contentious claims that require some careful unpacking. Is a go-bot learning, for instance, to make intuitive judgments about situations that have few of the hard-edged landmarks that computer programs excel at sorting through? In the face of this rather sceptical line of arguement, the 2nd issue of Volume 17 of Journal of Go Studies attempts to intervene in above conjunctures, centering on the theme of ‘Rethinking Go in the Age of AI’.

Papers which investigate the following topics are especially welcomed:

■ Technical issues about the structure and key framework of Go AI (e.g., the deep neural network model, training with RL, MCTS, decision-making mechanism etc.)

■ Evaluating the current state of Go (e.g., the characteristics or novelty of AI’s moves, uncovering hidden patterns and structures of AI's moves etc.)

■ How to establish a solid model in Go Studies (e.g., methodology, prospect of a roadmap toward a science, or inter-disciplinary researches etc.)

■ The role of Go in the age of AI (the direction of developing insights and positive spirits embedded in human nature, how to enhance learning capabilities in the age of AI etc.)

■ Other AI topics related to Go


1. Please send your submission together with the abstract (Word format, maximum of 500 words) to Kim Chaelim, Secretary General of ISGS, at badukstudies@gmail.com no later than 10 Sept. 2023.

2. Papers are to be sent to the address above by 15 Oct. 2023. Submitted papers will be subject to a double-blind review process.

3. If the submission is accepted for publication, it will be published on Nov., 24, 2023.


Thank you for your attention.


Editor-in-Chief Journal of Go Studies: Bae Incheol (Ph,D Economics, Research Fellow at Fiscal Reform Institute, Korea)