Yup, my journal is coming slowly but surely. Soon, I'll find myself catching up on my boston/new york journal! Uhoh... For previous entries in my Torino Journal, see Day One, Day Two, or Day Three

We got up the next morning for the first day of the conference. The conference was held at a different location than the olympiad so we needed to find our way to a new location. Unfortunately, we got turned around and missed most of the first talk. The conference was held in a really cool room with two statues at the front of the room. It totally didn't feel like a place you'd attend classes, but I gather that's precisely what one does if taking classes at this university.

The room was situated in a building which had an inside courtyard. In fact, there was quite a blurry line between inside and outside. As soon as you step outside your room, you may have a roof over your head, but the balcony you happen to be on is filled with fresh air from the outdoor courtyard. The building was totally beautiful and I wandered around the area taking photos of the various statues that lined the walls of the area (during breaks of course!).

After the morning conference talks were over we traveled down the the oval to begin the olympiad (making a quick stop for lunch). After making a couple preparations, we thought we were ready. We beat the Australian program with no real trouble in those two games, but then we lost two games against the champion from the last olympiad. Argh! It turned out we had a couple of rather embarassing bugs. Frankly, none of us really could believe that we had missed them. Oops! Shows the need for some real play testing hmm?

After the competition we madly tried to fix the bugs. They were really dumb, but also quite elusive and took us a long time to solve. By the time we had tracked down the problem it was quite late so we decided to return to our hotel room. Once there we left to get some food and that outing turned out to last quite awhile as we enjoyed quite a bit of red wine, and some tasty Italian cuisine. I wish I could get late night food like that here in town!!

We got back to our hotel really really late, but still had to fix the problems we had discovered. Argh! We ended up crashing before everything was fixed, and the next morning missed the conference as we attempted to get the program up and running in a state we were comfortable with. Turns out that didn't really happen.

Finally we had to return to the oval so we packed up our program, and headed down there. The competition started up and we lost our games to the champion ensuring that we were fighting for 2nd place. Easy, we thought ...

Turns out that the Australian program had a learning algorithm in it and it was much tougher after playing the other games during the tournament. Our program was a little shaky, and we actually lost the first game against the program! Uhoh. We played the next game, hoping to win so we could avoid a playoff to decide the winning program. At this point we were pretty tired and really didn't want to spend that night looking at our program and getting it ready for a playoff!

Our program looked to have a good start, but then it got itself into trouble. Enough so that it actually figured it had lost the game. Thankfully, the part of the code that handled playing "tough" moves in a lost position saved our bacon as the other program didn't realize it had won (it wasn't a trivial win) and messed up so we were able to recover and win the match. Whew!

Having got past that scare, we journeyed a little ways to another little restaurant for dinner which served us another wonderful meal. Boy were we ever being spoiled with good food!

We returned to our hotel room to relax and play some cards. Then we fell asleep tired, but ready to get some rest for the next day which we planned to go see some sights!

The conclusion to my journal comes next time!

Heraldk