• School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they'll be delicious and meaty
  • CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
  • CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
  • ...actually, I'm also taking spanish!
• "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I'm really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I'll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I'll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
• BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
• Peter Michaux's Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he's blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I'm following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
• The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.

So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn't be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!

Also, if I haven't mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It's fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast's I've ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.

But now I'm stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I'm actually quite excited to try out.

Finally, I'm reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.

Anyways, I thought I'd pop in and mention something I should have back in January when it started, which is that two friends and I entered MIT's BattleCode competition. It's an AI competition that a class at MIT was running, but was also open to public participation. Basically you are writing AI to run inside robots on a battle field. You and your opponent start with a few robots and they have to coordinate and do things like build more units, mine, and attack then enemy. The AI executes inside each robot so there is not overall "player" of the game, just lots of instances of your code, hopefully working together. It was a fun neat challenge.

It also reminded me of how much I'm not a fan of Java, and don't think I didn't make a list that I might publish if I get unlazy at some future point. Anyways, we worked on it for a while and then the open tournament was run. And we got the results back this week,

Now since the MIT teams had class time and a whole class of people to work with and bounce ideas off of, sadly they still dominated.

But there was a second ranking, this time of Non MIT teams only, and now for the real surprise: we won!

battlecode.mit.edu/2009/info/glory

Our team was called "Bad Meme" and we were representing UBC and you can see it all their on the results page. Of all the other non MIT teams, we were the best. It's really kind of surprising and awesome. Especially when you consider that anyone anywhere could enter and it appears that there were teams from places like Stanford and Harvard, and that we beat them. So that's kind of a buzz.

And so that a big chunk of what I've been doing in the past month: programming battle AI. That and school. But now with the competition over and school coming to a draw it's time to look for some new projects. I have a few ideas already, hopefully I'll get around to mentioning them before they are over this time, but time will tell.

So far the only entered contenders are myself with "fink" and Rob with "RGB". He took an early lead for a while and was working towards beating our house bot, "Amigo" (found on the net, an old Go bot from the early 90s, was originally an Amiga gobot that was someone's PhD dissertation. It isn't super good, but it is fast), and making progress on that. I finally got some free time and have been working a ton in the last week and on friday got my bot up to a point where it could beat his, and thus took the lead. Now with some actual competition the two of use are both hacking away at a good pace and he's retaken the lead for now but neither of use can quite best Amigo yet.

I'm also pretty happy with myself as my entry is coded entirely in Lisp, and this is my first actual Lisp project. So things are sailing smoothly enough, and I'm also learning tons about Lisp. Also, I'm crediting the high level power of Lisp with letting me do more interesting things easily, which I'm going to attribute to the fact that my bot runs at usually 1/3 to 1/2 the time Rob's does, even when beating it, and his is written in C. So when it comes to thinking about optimizing, it seems algorithms are a lot more important than the speed of the language implementing it, and a language that lets you more easily use more complex algorithms is possibly better. We'll see though once everything is all said and done .

We're hoping a few of the other people who have expressed interest will soon get enough code together to join the competition, and we're always looking for more interested people. The more the merrier!

Anyone who is interested is more than welcome to join our merry little band of novice AI hackers. Just sign up on the wiki and make your presence known.

As for writing the Goserver software, that was an interesting little adventure. We built it around GnuGo's twogtp.py initially. This was my first time really working in Python, and I've got to say it was a pleasure. The language does a really credible job of getting out of your way and just letting you do stuff. There are a few odd little things about the language but once you get up to speed coding in it they hardly seem a problem. I still think I like Ruby overall for elegance, but until Ruby 2.0 lands with it's proper VM, execution speed isn't even comparable. Not that for this server that was an issue, more that we had a bunch of already written python code in gtptwo.py, which is is why Python was chosen. Still defiantly pleased, it's a fine language. So yeah, fun times.

As for a little more history for the 0 people who are interested, we're using GTP (Go Text Protocol) for the communication between engines and server. It's a protocol penned by the folks at GNU for GNU Go but being adopted else where. So there's plenty of software that can speak GTP as a client and several engine vs engine pieces of code using GTP out on the web GPLed for public use. However, running an actually Go server means you need to facilitate lots and lots of matches and also keep track of scores. Code for all that for the different internet Go servers is all closed source, which is why we had to write our own before we could start the competition. That done, we're all ready to Go!