11/06/2026
You’ve heard about “Playing God,” but what about “Playing Heaven”?
That’s the name of a new inter-university research collaboration between HKU, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the National University of Singapore that just launched this month. Led by Professor Javier Cha of the Faculty of Arts, HKU , the team is exploring how advances in artificial intelligence can reshape the study of East Asia’s intellectual and cultural history.
That involves developing domain-specific AI systems capable of re-examining semantic features, stylistic variation, and patterns of argumentation in texts from hundreds of writers and philosophers. Previously, that would have been an “overwhelming” task, Professor Cha says, but the rise of transformer-based models has made it possible to leverage machine learning to interpret texts and map arguments.
The project also seeks to move beyond established intellectual genealogies and canonical figures. By examining hundreds of writers, scholars, and texts simultaneously, the researchers hope to uncover overlooked connections, forgotten actors, and alternative pathways of intellectual transmission that conventional methods often miss.
Supported by a prestigious Humanities and AI Virtual Institute grant from Schmidt Sciences – “Playing Heaven” is among HAVI’s first funded projects and the only one so far primarily based in Asia – the project brings together expertise in history, computational humanities, complexity science, machine learning, and archival science from three leading universities.
The HKU team consists of Professor Cha, Dr Eric Chow, Dr Donghyeok Choi, and Solomon Ho. In addition to the HKU team, “Playing Heaven” will feature projects led by HKUST historian Professor Michael Yan Hong and computational humanities experts Professor Yumeng Hou and Professor Miguel Escobar Varela of NUS.
“The point is not to let the machine play historian, but to use it to sharpen the questions historians can ask,” Professor Cha said at the launch event. “Recent developments in agentic AI are prompting us to rethink where the boundary lies between assistance and automation. We still have much to learn about what future systems may be capable of, but one of the project’s goals is to explore those possibilities critically while keeping historical judgment and interpretation at the centre of the research process.”
To learn more about Playing Heaven, visit the project page here: https://bigdatastudies.net/playing-heaven/
