This is day two of my Torino journal. For part one, go here. Tired from almost two full days with only a couple hours of "sleep" on the plane, we got a good night's sleep and were up and about around 7am. We wandered downstairs and got some breakfast from the provided breakfast buffet - which was good for the first day, but started to lose its appeal later in the week. The greatest thing about the buffet was a machine that at the push of a button poured a very nice cappuccino or mochaccino or one of at least 10 other hot drinks.

After breakfast we returned to our rooms to work on our hex program. It still needed quite a bit of work before it was ready for the competition. However, we ran into some issues trying to get web access at the hotel even though they had advertised wireless internet access from within the rooms (which there wasn't). We got a little bit done though, and then we had to head down to the Oval to register within the 1pm-9pm slot that people were working the registration booth. So we made our first encounter with the Torino transit system. Boy would it be nice to have an efficient transit system here in Edmonton! Trams/busses/trains came with high regularity and it was very easy to get around on the system.

The trip down to the Oval didn't take too long, but when we got out at the stop we thought we needed, it turned out that we couldn't get access to the oval from the side we were on and ended up having to walk all the way around and through the large HUB-mall-style-only-larger Lingotto shopping mall and then around to the Oval. What's funny is we could see it several times, but there was always a gate or a fence (locked of course) in our way. I've got a good picture of our frustration that maybe I'll post to my photoblog at some point.

Finally we made it, and Ryan and I got registered. Phil and Broderick's security information had apparently got misplaced so we had to wait for Ryan to get one of the main conference organizers to come and give them access. Finally we all had our little security passes including our own picture and a strand to put around our neck that had "Torino 2006" written on the side. It kinda looked like they were left over from the olympics, but then again, there was no olympic rings on it.

Anyways, we got in and started to organize ourselves. We said hi to several people we knew including Jonathan (my supervisor), Yngvi (used to help us with our hex project), Nathan (post-doc at our university), Mike (fellow grad student, working on computer billiards), and a few others I can't think of right now. We set up our laptops and got some work done as well as started organizing the machines we would need for our competition.

The oval was pretty neat. It's like the Agricom here in Edmonton - a place where conferences can be put on. It would've been something else to see the place when it had the speed skating track all set up, but there really was no remnants we could see from that except perhaps the large stands that people could sit on. The computer olympiad was being co-hosted with the human chess olympiad, so it was really cool to see a room full of hundreds of chess boards right next to our area full of computers!

Fiat, the major car manufacturer in Torino was a major sponser of the event and had a large area with giant chess sets to play with. Kinda cool to see chess that you have to walk over to the piece you want to move, pick it up and haul it over to the square you want to move it to!

We wrapped up what work we were doing and decided to join Mike and some of the pool group in finding a place to eat dinner. Ryan decided he was tired so he returned to the hotel and have dinner at the place we had had dinner the previous night. The rest of us, a group of about 10 or so wandered downtown to find a place to eat. Mark, one of the pool guys, knew quite a bit more Italian than anyone else in our group, so we deferred to him to ask for a good place. A couple locals pointed us towards a restaurant called the "Conservatore" and it was amazing! The staff was really friendly and bantered with us throughout the meal. We got free appetizers and at the end they even gave us a bottle of limoncello - which is a lemon liqueur which was really really good!

You should check out that restaurant if you're ever in Torino - it was very reasonable cost-wise, but very very good food-wise!

Phil, Broderick and I decided to walk back to our hotel from the restaurant. Turns out that it really wasn't a trivial walk and it took us about an hour or so to get back. On the way though, we were treated to some amazing scenes of architecture. It seemed like every couple blocks there was another statue or cathedral or roman ruins or random other cool stuff. I had my camera out every couple of blocks to take yet another picture. Its too bad I didn't have my tripod with me because some of the pictures didn't really turn out. Turns out its really hard to keep the camera totally still for the entire time the shutter is open for night pictures. Oh well, I got some pictures and that's cool.

We finally arrived back at our hotel at a pretty late hour and the gates to the hotel were closed. There was a bell though that we could ring and the guy at the front desk who was taking a nap let us in. We felt a little guilty, but we needed to get to bed!

Day three, coming up next! Heraldk