Richard
Tennis Ball
Lorentz

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The Game of GO 
Computer Chess 

Research

A Go Board     My major research activity currently involves the study of game playing programming.  There are many games that are interesting from a programming and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) point of view.  I am currently working on a program named Invader to play Amazons, a fairly new game that is attracting interest in the game programming community because it is not as difficult as go, but provides interesting challenges not found in many other games, like chess or checkers.  I am seeking graduate and undergraduate students to work on projects related to Amazons.

Click here to see some of my ideas for Master's theses and projects.

     The game of go, another game I am interested in for both programming and recreational reasons, is a game of skill that originated in China more than 2000 years ago.  It is currently very popular throughout Asia, and is now beginning to gain in popularity in the West.  It is played by two players on a 19 by 19 grid.  The players place stones on intersection points of the grid in an effort to map out territory and to capture opponent's stones. 
     Go has proven difficult to program in large part because the board is so big and so it is very difficult for the computer to calculate more then a very few moves ahead.  The best computer go playing program currently plays at about the level achieved by most humans after playing casually for about a year.  Compare this to the best chess playing program that is currently one of the best chess players in the world. 
    My recent go work centers on studying go on boards smaller than the standard 19 by 19 size.  In so doing, I hope to gain insights that may be difficult to achieve when dealing with larger and thus less manageable go boards.

     I am also interested in discrete algorithms in general and recursive algorithms in particular.  Please click here to see more about an elementary book on recursive algorithms I wrote a few years ago. 

Send me email:  lorentz@csun.edu.    Last updated 01/21/2008.