Posts tagged session
Match Aftermath
Jul 26th
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 
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
Match Day 1
Jul 24th
I got up relatively early this morning. I had had trouble sleeping due to being excited about today’s match! After getting up and ready to go, we wandered over to the hotel to finish setting stuff up. Our match started at noon today with Ali Eslami taking the first match in the public room and Phil Laak in the private hotel room. After getting everything setup, the match began with a bunch of fanfare from Jonathan Schaeffer. For the blow by blow details, check out the official home page for the blog that I worked on throughout the two sessions in the public room. To make a long story short, we drew the first session and won the second session by a large margin. We won! Wow, that was an incredible feeling.
I’m frazzled right now, so I need to head for bed. Let me quickly give some other hilights from today before I run. I didn’t really get a chance to eat lunch before the match started so I was starving by the time the first session was done. When a group of four of us (Neil, Nolan, Josh and I) descended to the lobby to go find food we ran into Phil, Ali and Ali’s girlfriend Ana who were about to pursue food themselves. So they asked us if we wanted to join them and we said … YES of course! So we went to a restaurant called Cactus Luv Cafe and got to chat it up with these poker pros (all three are pros: Ana plays limits of $100/$200), and talk about technology, and research, and life. It was awesome. All three of them are incredibly nice people and I’m so glad I’ve gotten a chance to meet them and talk to them about stuff that interests me.
After the match I had to make some updates to the website and finish off the liveblogs for the day. I then ran DIVAT analysis on the matches, and those graphs will hit the webpages when I get the chance to do it. Ali seemed incredibly interested in the DIVAT analysis and where they went wrong. It’ll be interesting to see how they adjust tomorrow.
Anyways, I’m off to bed. This is incredibly exciting, but I’m totally beat and I’ve got another long day of blogging ahead of me. Woohoo! G’nite all!
Heraldk
The Prep Day
Jul 23rd
IE: Vancouver, Day 2.
Today was preparation day. I woke up without aid of my alarm at about 8:00 local time, and went and checked my email. The poker event that we’re doing has been picked up by some major news sources including the Associated Press New York, and PokerNews.com. Weeeee!
Tomorrow’s the big day, so we needed to get stuff setup. Darse, Alexandra and I went and got breakfast at a place below us that served some decent omelets with some huge crossiants on the side. Sweeet. We wandered over to the hotel where we met with Phil Laak — he seems pretty distractable in person … pretty much like on TV. It’s pretty cool to meet someone you’ve seen on TV several times and never expected to meet. This is about as close as I want to get to fame — I’m not really looking to be famous
Apple lent us 6 laptops so we picked them up from the hotel and went to go get them setup. Unfortunately, setting them up was quite a pain, and we didn’t get away for lunch due to the room prep and the laptop setups. The press conference was at 1:00. We didn’t get a huge turnout, but BBC had a radio crew there and there was a set of people from other news sources. We expect more media to show up during the event. We’ll have to see how that turns out!
After the press conference we had a player’s meeting in which we met up with Phil and Ali to discuss the rules and things to make the players comfortable. We want them to be treated well since they’re doing us a pretty big favour here. Everything went smoothly. Both Phil and Ali are very agreeable and I’m looking forward to seeing them in action tomorrow. I’ll probably learn a few things!
After the player’s meeting we continued making room arrangements. A few of us split for a late lunch at an express noodle place. It wasn’t too bad — a bit too oily on a couple dishes for my liking, but the food was alright.
We returned to the room to continue setup. It went well, but there’s a lot of stuff to do. We also needed to get the system up and running in order to test everything out. Hopefully everything works as advertised! Fairly late we found a problem with the power supply to the room. Apparently we were all hooked up to one outlet! That’d be 5 or 6 laptops and two huge projectors along with a camcorder. Yup, that’s not good. It looks like we’ve got the power sorted out now. Tomorrow we’ll have to double check the setup and see how things go.
We went as a huge UofA group to dinner at Earls. I didn’t really like the choice — we’re in Vancouver for goodness sake! Josh from our group used to work at Earls though and he suggested a pretty good drink: A Keith’s Iceberg. It’s a Keith’s India pale ale with some lime margarita mix in the top. It pretty much makes the Keith’s taste like strongbow which was pretty cool.
After dinner I bought some plastic poker chips to play some poker with my colleagues. There was a lot of action hands … and it appeared that people played pretty well even with no money on the line. I played really well (and also got really lucky, hitting some good cards). Then I lost a key hand where I flopped a set of 2s, but the guy who pushed into me had an open ended straight draw and a flush draw. His straight hit on the turn, and his bigger straight/flush card came on the river. No love for me. That crippled me, though I doubled up on the next hand with 33. Unfortunately I lost my stack on the next hand when I flopped top pair of 7s only to lose to Neil’s better kicker. Oops.
So now I’m back at the hotel trying to get my photos from today uploaded to my laptop so I have a clean memory card when I go in tomorrow. I need a clean memory card since tomorrow I’ll likely fill my card with photos!
Anyways. That’s day 2. Tomorrow is the first 2 session of the man-machine poker match!!!!
Heraldk
Back to UB
Mar 17th
I returned to ultimate bet this weekend to play there a bit last night and this morning. Last night went terribly – I didn’t get any action on my big hands, but kept getting played back at when I didn’t get a hand. So I dropped two stacks at $100NL before calling it a night. This morning, on the other hand, was beautiful. I got myself back up to even from last night’s losses and then proceeded to stack another couple players for a net session profit of $425. So in two days, I’m up $225-ish. Sweet.
In a little while, my grandparents are coming over. My Grandma is going to teach me how to bake her bun recipe. Let me tell you: these buns are awesome. I can’t wait to have a batch tomorrow morning — hot and steaming straight from the oven. Mmmmmm. I’ll try and get some pictures part way through and of the end product.
Heraldk
Work and Poker
Feb 27th
Yup, that’s what I do.
Diane was away for a few days last week so I spent a lot of time finishing up my interpoker bonus for this month. Unfortunately I tanked, and ended up only up $190 for the month in poker plus all the associated bonuses ($300) and rakeback (probably around $150). So, while I made some money, I certainly wasn’t up near as much as I’d like to be.
The good news is that I sat down for a session at UB, and I think I’m gonna stick around there for a bit longer this time around. The players were noticeably worse than at interpoker. Where it was a struggle to win chips against some of the grinders at interpoker, UB was almost immediately profitable. Sure, it helped that I hit some hands, but some of those players were playing brutally. I made $180 in one two-tabling session tonight! Sweeet. A lot of that came on a hand where I rivered a full house against a maniac player who had actually flopped a straight. I couldn’t put him on a straight and had to call his all in with a set of queens. Another notable fact from tonight is I made TWO straight flushes. Its been weeks/months since my last straight flush and then I make two tonight … and both of them I stacked a guy (less than full stacks though). I did suffer a couple bad beats, including one where I flopped a set of deuces and lost to a guy who rivered a jack for a bigger set. Oh well, those things happen.
In other news, work continues at a good pace. I’m getting stuff done and that feels really nice. I have a pretty productive office environment which is helping me stay more focused than I was before. I’m pretty happy with where my life is at the moment. It is pretty exciting!
Heraldk
Downs and Ups
Feb 21st
Tonight was a wild night for poker. I played a quick 45 minute session before dinner and raked in $70-ish dollars in short order. After dinner I played for several hours … but the first couple hours was pretty rough. One guy stacked my twice while playing $100NL. The first hand, I raised 24s from the button first in. I hit a 4, but not much else. However, I get to see the turn and river cheaply and hit running 2s for a full house. Unfortunately for me, the guy in the big blind had trip 3s which also filled up. There goes one stack!
A few hands later, I get AKs. Make a standard raise from late position and get called by the same guy who stacked me the first time. Hit top pair aces, so I continuation bet. I play this hand the same way as the last big hand … and hit an ace for trips on the river. Fully expecting to win, I get it all in on the river and … lose to another boat. Holy. Crap.
So, I was $200 in the hole at that point. However, those beats I didn’t feel too bad about. I wasn’t going to get away from those all that easily, so I felt like I played them alright. So I continued playing. I won back two stacks over the next half hour and crawled back to take a slight loss overall today (including the session before dinner). Oh well, it sure beats being down more than that. In good news, I’m still up a few hundred dollars this month at Interpoker and need to clear just 430 points or so to complete my remaining $200 bonus (so I’m more than 2/3 done the total $200 bonus). That plus rakeback should leave me in a pretty profitable position … assuming I can avoid being stacked too many times!
Heraldk
Thesis Progress
Oct 16th
So Jonathan returned my thesis to me on Tuesday with modifications almost entirely fitting into the minor modifications category. So for the rest of the week I made the appropriate modifications and talked to Darse about the sections that needed a little work. So now Darse is doing a full read of my thesis and hopefully that goes well for the state of my thesis!
This weekend I was notified about giving the GAMES meeting talk this week on DIVAT, so I’ll be working on the presentation all this week. On the whole, however, my thesis is getting close to finished. Soon I’ll be defending and then on to finding a job (scary thought).
In other news, this past week was crazy busy even though it was shortened by Thanksgiving (a Thanksgiving, I might add, that I had a dinner on each night!). On Wednesday, one of the new grad students hosted a games party with the idea of holding one on a weekly basis. I’m excited about the chance to play some of the games that don’t really belong at games parties. On Thursday, Mike Smith had his free beer for successfully defending his masters thesis. So Diane and I joined him and several others for drinking beer and watching the oiler hockey game. A very exciting game, I might add! On Friday we played our second session of a Serenity RPG. Its interesting, though I’m having a little trouble getting into it.
Saturday was the games party at Michael Buro’s place. It was really fun – I played three new games … one of which was a new party game of Curtis’. Its kind of a cross between apples to apples and Balderdash. Lots of fun was had by all!
So life has been real busy lately. I’m trying really hard to keep the distractions from killing my productivity. Let’s see how I do!
Heraldk
Poker Bankroll Building Part 3
Oct 6th
This post is going to be quite a bit more choppy than the previous ones since this is when I stopped getting physical documents and really started utilizing Neteller for maximum bonus clearing power. This is going to be a complete rundown of my bankroll building up to the present day, so it might be a little long. After this, I plan on giving an update every couple of months so that I don’t fall behind like this again!
So this update will be a little different than the last. I will be talking about just my poker bankroll building leaving the casino bonuses to the next post. I’m going to separate each session based on poker room rather than by dates because otherwise this will be supremely confusing to follow!
Noble Poker
PSO launched an exciting new room with a gigantic bonus (at the time) of 100% match of $500. This room was called Noble poker, and I just happened to have close to that amount in my neteller account so I deposited in April 2005. I would play there over the course of several months. I did very well very early and was able to cash out my initial desposit on June 14, and continue playing there until I had cleared my entire bonus. In the end, I made $897 plus my $60 in PSO points.
Net: $897 + $60 PSO points
Paradise Poker
During my time at Noble I also started the paradise poker promo through PSO. From my $200 deposit, I made another $80 cashing out only a week later. In addition, PSO paid me $60 in PSO points. I rather liked my experience at Paradise, so much later I would attempt a reload bonus there in November 2005. This time, however I would lose $195 … perhaps because I had grown accustomed to having poker tracker stats of players!
Net: -$115 + $60 PSO points
Party Poker
Party Poker figures into a lot of short play segments partially because they had one of the fastest cashouts available. As a result, I would deposit there for a bonus and then withdraw via cheque to actually aquire my funds. Since then, I have been using neteller cheque withdraws since they are fast and only cost $2. This way, all my cashouts happen from the same place and are logged. The early times caused some confusion in recreating my play history!
Anyways, I played several sessions at party poker having mixed results:
June 23/05: $87 profit
Oct 6/05: $4 profit
Apr 12/06: $150 profit (Party gave free money and I went on a nice run)
Jul 13/06: $8 profit (Received a gc for a casino bonus, this was the poker play part)
Net: $249 profit
Poker Rewards
Another PSO promo with a healthy deposit bonus, I deposited $400 in Jun 2005, and cashed out $654 just a couple weeks later with yet another $60 in PSO points. Much later, I would deposit for another deposit bonus in April 2006 to qualify for a PSO freeroll. I didn’t do too well on that deposit losing my bonus and $21.72 on top of that. Thankfully, the freeroll was both underpopulated and I finished in the top 20 which paid my $200.
Net: $832.28 + $60 PSO points
Ultimate Bet
This is my rakeback room, so I would play here many times, but not for very long segments since I jumped around to do new PSO promotions as they popped up. This is a very confusing thing to track as well because I deposited several times in order to rack up deposit bonuses that don’t expire. I still have a lot of bonus money to clear there! I made deposits in Jun/05, Dec/05, Feb/06, and Apr/06, and to this day still have money in that account. I did not play well there though, and frustratingly saw net losses at several points. Thankfully, that seems to have turned around the last time I was there plus all the rakeback I’ve received.
June/05: -$32.90 losses
Dec/05-Feb/06: -$67.76 losses
Apr/06-present: $130 profit
PSO Rakeback: $147 in PSO points
Net: $29.34 + $147 in PSO points + 1 poker book from player points
Aztec Poker
This is another rakeback room that I started because I was I wanted some variety for my rakeback rooms. I didn’t play there much because I ended up not liking the room very much, and ended with slight losses
Net: -$16.05 losses + neglible PSO points
Full Tilt Poker
Probably one of my favourite online poker rooms so far, I have played for many months at Full Tilt enjoying fairly decent success. It is the room where I moved up to 2/4 limit eventually and started winning regularly there. I probably still make many errors, but between the deposit bonuses and my small winning rate I turned a neat profit. I’m disappointed that I don’t have rakeback there, or I would play there more often. Even now, I still like to go back there. I played there enough that I saved enough player points for a very snazzy micro-suede full tilt jacket.
Jul/05-Nov/05: $607 profit + $60 in PSO points
Jan/06-Feb/06: $201 profit
Apr/06-Jun/06: $250.35 profit
Jun/06-Aug/06: $425.45 profit
Net: $1483.80 profit + $60 PSO points + 1 micro-suede jacket
Titan Poker
After my success with Noble Poker, I was enthused about having another shot at it when it was rebranded Titan poker and re-available as a PSO promotion in Sep/05. This time, however, I did not enjoy the same success and ended up losing $72 on the deal. Fortunately, the PSO bonus was $90 in PSO points, so I barely gained on the promo.
Net: -$72 losses + $90 PSO points
Sun Poker
Another PSO promo I attempted in Oct/05, this one I eeked out a profit on even though I didn’t like the site due to the lack of tables to play at. It did however get me my very first and so far only royal flush!
Net: $24 + $60 PSO points
Absolute Poker
I returned to Absolute to play in the PSO league that happened earlier this year. I did well in the first league event, but after that played rather poorly and stopped playing after it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to compete for the big prizes. In ring game play I also did rather poorly, so I cashed out with a $70 loss.
Net: -$70 losses
Pokerroom
Pokerroom was the very first room I got a start with way back when, but I never deposited any money there. I learned from PSO that if I had them close my account, I could open a new one through PSO 6 months later and take advantage of the PSO bonus. In Apr/06 this period had passed so I deposited and made a decent $198 profit plus my PSO bonus
Net: $198 + $90 PSO points
Pokershare
Pokershare was the newest PSO promo in Jun/06 and it is by far the worst I’ve done on any promo. Unfortunately, there was almost no limit action there so I was either forced to play 2/4 shorthanded or no limit both of which were not comfortable games for me at the time (and still at the moment). I managed to get through the promo losing $138 which was countered with the $90 PSO bonus.
Net: -$138 losses + $90 PSO bonus
Dream Poker
Dream poker is currently the newest PSO bonus room, and I finally took advantage of this promo in Aug/06. I deposited for the full deposit bonus, but today I cashed out having only received 1/4 of it. Being a prima poker room, I didn’t like the lack of games in the evenings (since the majority of the players who play there are european). However, I made a decent profit playing 1/2 shorthanded and cashed out $124 profit plus my PSO bonus.
Net: $124 + $60 PSO bonus
PSO Referrals and Other points
My referrals kept rolling in at a regular but slow pace and I made a startling $250 in referrals since the last post. In addition, there was a forum contest that netted me another $25 in PSO points.
Net: $275 in PSO points
Totals!
Net this post: $3496.37 profit + $1052 PSO points + 1 small poker book + 1 microsueded jacket
Net Poker Winnings to date: $4582.37 USD + $3490 CAD + $1442.50 PSO points + 1000 chips + 1 poker book + 1 microsuede jacket
It isn’t enough to make a living off of, but I think I’ve proven that I can make money at poker online. I’ve had some rocky patches, but that’s how it goes! Thanks to WoW, I haven’t been playing much online poker lately, but I intend on returning to it and learning how to play no limit well.
There will be one more post in this series that summarizes my online casino bonus gathering. I’ve been pretty successful at that too, so I look forward to showing how profitable that can be!
Heraldk
Last Conference Day
Jul 20th
Well today was the last day of the conference, so tonight is the last night in Boston. Man, time goes by quickly, particularly when you’re being kept crazy busy! Tonight’s post is only one day of coverage so shouldn’t be quite so long.
This morning was another 8am wakeup. The night before we had Brad and Chris stay the night in our room since they hadn’t had a place for the night. Apparently the hotel hadn’t managed to find them a room in the hotel for them that night despite them being on the waiting list for a room over a month ago. Plus a couple people we personally know booked rooms since and got in. Weird.
Anyways, we got up and proceeded to get breakfast again before heading to the first paper talks of the day. The hilight of the day were the talks by Mike Smith and the other speakers at the “Hall of Champions”. The first speaker was from Austin, Texas and he talked about their general game playing program (they had the 2nd annual competition this year at AAAI). The 2nd speaker was from the DARPA grand challenge winning team from Stanford. It wasn’t the same guy as the last talk from the same group – instead it was the lead programmer. Not a long talk since it was for a paper, but it was still very interesting to hear them talk about the sort of challenges they had to deal with. Mike did well at his talk, considering he had to follow up such a crazy intelligent presenter. The pool stuff is actually really cool, so I don’t think there was much trouble having people pay attention to his stuff.
After the talk, we wandered over to a session that was pretty much a UofA hilight session. Michael Bowling gave a talk, his student gave a talk, and Doug (another UofA grad student) gave a talk as well! All told, Michael Bowling had his name on SIX AAAI papers this year, which is pretty insane. That’s a whole lot of work he’s got his fingers into.
Lunch was the next thing on the plate, so we organized and went out for lunch again at the LTK. It was okay, though they weren’t quite so snappy with the service that we’ve seen in the previous visits, so I wasn’t as impressed. Still, I was happy.
The last talk we attended was the results for the three competitions that were run. In particular, these were the general games playing competition, some sort of robot interaction/integration competition, and of course our poker competition. Yay for the UofA!
We had the afternoon/evening free from the conference as this pretty much wrapped up the events. So we got up and headed out to find an ice cream place Nolan claimed was supposed to be really good. It was called Toscanini’s, and it was actually not bad but I’m not too sure it was worth the long trip and the cost of the ice cream itself. It wasn’t the marble slab! Still, one cannot argue with ice cream!
We returned to the hotel to meet some people after wandering around Harvard with our ice cream. Then we headed out for dinner – and got lucky. We tried the “Barking Crab” which looks like a popular place. Unfortunately, so popular that we had no chance of getting in in time to sooth our hungry stomachs. So we left and headed downtown – and caught the kitchen still open with about 10 minutes to spare at a bar called Coogans or something of that flavour. The food was alright, but nothing incredible. Still, it was good to get some food. This being the last night, several people drank heavily but I didn’t really feel like having too much. I did join them for a drink called the “Dirty Girl Scout” which turned out to be a drink with Baileys, Creme de Cacao, Creme de Menthe and Kahlua. It was *really* good – so you should try it sometime!
We stayed for awhile until the bad bar music got on our nerves and several of us left. I had brought my tripod and got some neat shots of the tower that was close to the quincy market. There was a fog over the city almost all day and this made for some interesting pictures.
And now we’re back in the hotel room. I’m gonna try and pack up most of my stuff so I just have to shower and meet up with Mike – we’re off to foxwoods tomorrow morning! w00t! Wish me luck!
Heraldk
Boston Conference Begins!
Jul 19th
I haven’t had a large amount of time to actually sit down and keep up my journal, and I’m falling rapidly behind as a result, so I think I’m going to try and very quickly summarize what I’ve been up to.
After exploring the MIT and Harvard campuses, we returned to the hotel via transit and joined several others for an excursion to find dinner. So … apparently Bostonians don’t eat dinner on Sunday nights. There were very few restaurants that were actually open, and it took us a couple hours to find a restaurant suitable for all of us. Finally we did though, and enjoyed a dinner at an Irish pub called Ned Devine’s where I got myself some fish & chips.
Afterwards, we went and got a drink at another bar near by and then wandered back to the hotel to play some poker before bed.
The next day (Monday), I had a volunteer shift at the conference so I got up early to head over to the conference location. My task was to take tickets for the first two hours of one of the tutorials which was a little boring, but not something I was too concerned with.
After my shift was over, I snuck into a workshop session on heuristic search since this is something I’m actually interested in. I stayed for a few talks before I had to sign in for my last volunteer shift. Oddly enough, they had moved the stuff out of the booth I was supposed to be working, and the work there was simple enough that the registration desk could handle it so I was out of some work. I got the assignment of “help out at the pre-registration desk”. Huh. Well I got leave to run over and join some people for lunch, and then come back and finish my shift later since I really had no set task.
After lunch, I came back and sat at the pre-registration desk which was actually pretty fun. I chatted with a couple of grad students for awhile about research and several other things. One guy had the same digital rebel camera I had and we talked about flickr and our photography experience together. If you’re interested, he’s one of my flickr contacts.
My laptop battery ran out, and I took this as a signal to finish the shift that was long since over so I left to go chat with the poker people about setting up our booth. We decided how we wanted the room setup and agreed to meet at 7:30 the next morning (and before the first keynote) so we could setup and get organized.
Monday was an empty-ish day for the conference as people were still arriving for the first day. The evening was the only all-conference people event which was a *very large*. There was snack food of many types, and there was even waiters carrying around more fancy hot food from the kitchen including some chicken satay skewers that were awesome. We were there for awhile, but then a large group decided to head out for some real dinner. A … very large group.
After dinner, Darse and I headed back to the hotel (rather than joining a group staying out a bit later) because we needed to work on some slides for the next day. We decided we wanted to set up a DIVAT poster so we could use it to discuss our research to people who were interested in it. It took us awhile to get some stuff done, but we did get a couple done before our brains were fried and Mike returned to play some more dealer’s choice style poker. Once Nolan and Mike got back we turned it in for bed around 1:00am.
Yesterday was the first full day of main conference talks. I got up early to go to the poker booth and help setup. Darse and I found some time to finish up our DIVAT slides/poster which we printed via our hotels awesome complimentary colour printing. After finishing those, we helped setup everything else and got a display setup for showing matches. We had a fair number of people come in and talk to us which was pretty cool. I have the feeling we’re going to see some news articles in the next week or so on the poker competition at AAAI since there was at least two or three press people there.
The first keynote talk was one on the semantic web which I didn’t really understand and I was pretty hungry so it was hard to concentrate on it. After the keynote I returned to the poker room to make sure everything was all setup and eat the sandwhich Darse bought for me. I spent a fair amount of time during the day answering questions in the poker display room despite the various talks that were going on during the week. Mostly, I wasn’t all that interested in the talks that were being presented. I did attend a talk by the professor who lead the DARPA grand challenge winning team. For those who don’t know, the DARPA grand challenge was a race for robot vehicle drivers. Each team was supposed to build a robot to race a vehicle through the desert somewhere in the US. It was a really impressive talk, with a lot of video that was really enjoyable to watch.
Afterwards, I returned to the poker room where we answered questions for awhile. A large group of people planned on heading out for dinner so I joined them. This time there was a significant non-ualberta contingent including a couple of girls from the University of Massachusetts and some people from the university of Maryland, and a few others I can’t remember at the moment. We went to an ‘asian fusion’ place that I think was mostly americanized Chinese food place. It was actually not bad, but I assumed it was more americanized than it actually was and ordered expecting kind of a personal meal. Instead I had a plate of chicken much more like what you’d get at a real Chinese food place in Edmonton. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t have much in the way of veggies!
Some of the people who were less fun (kidding) left to go back to the hotel and the rest of us decided to stay out a little longer and go to a bar for drinks and conversation. It sure was good to spend some time chatting with people from not the UofA. Not that UofA people aren’t fun to chat with, its just that it seems odd to be at a conference where you’re supposed to be meeting some new people.
We stayed out pretty late, and actually ended up getting caught in a pretty good rain storm. So the 4 of us walking back to the hotel were soaked – but we had fun!
It’s pretty late and I still need to do email here, but I’ll try and get today’s and tomorrow’s events up sometime tomorrow, but we’ll see if that actually happens or not, but I’ll try. Turns out that these posts take a long time to write!
Heraldk
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