So, much to my surprise, the National Research Foundation has agreed to fund my proposed research project into Computer Go. So now I have vacancies for Masters and PhD students, with a little bit of money to help potential students out. Bursaries are on the order of R30000 (about 3000 euro?) for masters students and R45000 (4500 euro?) for PhD students, but I can only support 2-3 students :( [I can take on more, I just don't have money to pay for them.]
The idea of the project is to look into the Monte Carlo approaches which have been so successful in the last few years. Depending on the level of interest, we may try to collaborate with the developers behind the open-source program FueGo.
I’ve also gotten money to pay for a student who’s interested in Machine Learning for robotic soccer. The bursary is more generous (about double the amount), but here there’s only money for one student.
More info for potential students: Go project; RoboCup project.
Maybe you should give some idea of living costs as well, if you’re giving the price in Euros. I’ve picked up the impression that doing a PhD in Europe, you might get about that amount in… two months? rather than in a year…
A movie in Zurich is 8x the price of a movie in Stellenbosch — hmmm, as if that’s the most critical thing for a student. Same goes for a beer? (Ok, maybe 5x.)
I would guess you’d do OK as a student with about R80000/year (so about 8000 euro) for all your costs, but it depends heavily on your lifestyle [this would exclude flight costs]. So the bursary should cover just less than half of your needs. International students may be able to get support from one of the university’s exchange programmes as well.