I grew up in a
house in a
suburb of
New York City. During
high school
I became interested in the
game of Go.
The summer of 1988, after finishing high school,
I spent a month in Seoul, Korea studying go, and in the fall I moved
to Tokyo, Japan to become the live-in disciple of
Oeda
Yusuke.
I lived
in Japan studying go and participating in the
Nihon Ki-in
(Japanese Go Association)'s professional promotion tournament as an
insei for a year and a half. In 1990 I Returned to the US to enter New York University. At NYU I started out studying creative writing, but accidentally became interested in the problem of Computer Go. I started designing a computer go program, and in 1992 joined forces with Tim Klinger, then a doctoral candidate in computer science at NYU's Courant Institute. I've been working with Tim on computer go research ever since. I graduated from NYU in 1994 with a BA in computer science.
After college, I spent a year and a half working on our go program, doing soulless freelance programming jobs, and working as Webmaster for the Village Voice.
In the fall of 1996, I entered the doctoral program in NYU's Center for Neural Science, and here I am today. I've recently started writing again: in December 1997 I wrote an essay about computer go for The Sciences.