Porting a computer GO program to the Windows CE platform

Computer GO has seen a significant development since the UCT algorithm was used successfully in computer GO game tree search in 2006. Monte Carlo Game Search based on the UCT algorithm has since become the standard approach in all modern computer GO programs, in which computer GO problems are solved numerically as optimization problems of a large Markov decision process. It is challenging to port modern computer programs to an embedded system such as the Windows CE platform because extremely limited computing and memory resources are available to conduct numerical computation. This paper describes an approach consisting of the following three steps to port lingo, a modern computer GO program to the Windows CE platform so that lingo can run on mobile phones and other embedded systems: Firstly, expert knowledge is extensively used in the Windows CE based computer GO program in order to reduce its reliance on numerical computation; secondly, we reduce the search space of game trees to meet the strict memory requirements in the Windows CE platform; and lastly, a graphical user interface is ported to Windows CE.