So the match is over, and I had a mere four and a half hours of sleep. Ouch. Still, it was a lot of fun. I got up and got some coffee and breakfast at Tim Hortons before heading up to the poker round table. I think people's tempers were short which meant that there was a bit of unhappiness amongst some of the team members. I hope things sorted themselves out, but it wasn't too pretty for awhile. Anyways, it was cool to meet up with some people who've started to gather and research computers playing poker. It should be cool to see what these guys come up with as they come up to speed. After the round table, I hung around to see the general games playing man-machine match. From what I'd heard, the generic game playing competition was poorly run this year, and it even ran with some controversy. The games that were selected for the playoffs were all very similar and were from a class of games that the best preliminary round player had trouble with. Ugh. Plus, the man-machine match they had was a little pathetic. The played a game that if the humans figured out how the rules work, it was trivial for them to win. So ... that's not a good thing to have in a "fair" match. Oh well. My friend Yngvi won the title, but that was partly due to an error by the other program. Yngvi himself knows the system for the games competition needs fixing, so hopefully changes are made soon.

After witnessing that, I worked on the man-machine web site for awhile as I spent my first session in a real AAAI talk. Heh - too much stuff for me to do. The man-machine web site needs a ton of work, but I'm gonna have to get to that slowly over the next few days. Lots of press articles to link to!

In the afternoon I got the video done that you see in the post before this. I felt that it needed to get done and uploaded since people needed to see what Ali and Phil said about the bots and the outcome of the match.

After that I hung around for awhile and ended up going to the poster session. That was really cool - there was a bunch of food, and I got to talk to a few people including Brett from the University of Minnesota who started working on poker. We talked for a long time about DIVAT and variance and vexbot, and ... how to calculate celcius from fahrenheit. Fun times.

After the poster session, we had found out that there was going to be a huge fireworks display in town. Apparently they do a fireworks contest and so Spain's turn was today and Canada's turn is Saturday. So we bustled down to river front and I borrowed Neil's tripod and I got a ton of photos. I hope some of them turned out! It was hard since people kept moving into my photo :P

So now I'm just waiting for my photos to finish copying and then I'm gonna crash for the night. G'nite all!

Heraldk