For thousands of years, research on Go has focused mainly on the development of Go techniques. The research on Go has been widened and diversified to cover various fields related to Go with a notable increase in published papers and books. Much of this achievement has been made by the members of Korean Society for Baduk Studies (KSBS) founded in 2003.

However, all the activities of KSBS were ceased after publishing the last journal in 2018. Since then, due mainly to the pandemic, as everyone knows, the reconstruction of KSBS has become a very remote possibility.

International Society of Go Studies (ISGS) which obviously inherits many things from KSBS, but functions as a completely new organization that can attract researchers from diverse countries worldwide. We would like to create together an environment where ISGS can solidify its root and grow as a strong global research center that can lead all the members to do research actively.

With the advent of ISGS, we hope that Go research will get diversified and rejuvenated to cover a wide range of topics and fields, such as Go-related industries, especially media, education, entertainment, and the studies of the history and culture of Go in each country and international exchanges, not to mention the traditional studies of Go techniques, terms, and rating systems. In particular, we hope that research on AI-related fields, which has become one of the hottest research topics in the Go community since the historic match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, will also gain momentum through ISGS. In addition, we want to become a hub for multi-disciplinary research where researchers from various countries unite and work together at a global scale as the name ‘international’ signifies.

We want many of you to join our efforts to open up a new path toward a global scale of Go research.