Finished the Dropquest 2012 multi-step scavenger hunt by Dropbox, albeit with some help from online forums, Internet searches, and even a bit of Wolfram Alpha. The Dropbox Blog has more details on the magical journey.

I voted against NC Amendment One.

There will be pork. Laurel and I attended The Carolina Pork Experiment at Motorco. My friend Stacie Nagy participated in the cooking competition, and came away with the Theo Peck Experimental Cooking Prize. Congratulations, Stacie!

Lately, I’ve been more and more frustrated with Google‘s increasing clutter, but their attempts to integrate their Google+ social network into their other offerings is what finally pushed me over the edge. I think other users may be feeling the same way, given some recent traffic statistics.

Consequently, I’ve decided to seriously use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for the next month. This post serves as my commitment device.

Though I can’t give these classes the full attention that they deserve, I’ve already found the online lecture format to be an improvement over the traditional classroom model of learning. Certainly, it’s possible to master these topics through self-study, but having forced deadlines has served as an excellent commitment device.

I participated in the NEA’s Read Across America and received a personal Certificate of Appreciation for my dramatic reading of When Charlie McButton Lost Power. Afterwards, the classroom of second graders at Wildwood Forest Elementary were quite enthusiastic and asked many good questions about video games, including “What is your favorite food?” and “How do I unlock characters in Super Smash Bros?”.

At this year’s Carolina Games Summit, Rogelio and I presented a talk on Introduction to Game AI Using Python. You can browse the project files for your own use (and experimentation!) at our GitHub page.

If you’re interested in learning more about Game AI, take a look at Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame by Will McGugan (Amazon), as well as Artificial Intelligence for Games by Ian Millington and John Funge (Amazon).

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend!

Colophon: The libraries PyGame and NumPy were used in the development of this demo. The PlanetCute prototyping tiles were used for the sprites, with the free background music provided by Deceased Superior Technician.

Access to the cluster is firewalled; you can first SSH into a public-facing NCSU server, but I’ve found it easiest to use NCSU’s Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client. If you’re using Windows, you can use the PuTTY Key Generator to quickly create a SSH-2 DSA public/private key pair.

I’m signed up to attend this year’s Carolina Games Summit, hosted annually at Wayne Community College. If all goes to plan, I’ll also be presenting a talk at the same event on implementing game AI using Pygame.

The review of your application and supporting documentation has been completed. I am pleased to advise that you have been reclassified as in-state for tuition purposes effective Spring 2012 semester.

At least something was accomplished this week.

While doing the upgrade, I went ahead and installed the Quick Cache plugin.

PHP Fatal error:  Cannot redeclare wfProfileIn()

Fortunately, the fix looks simple. Delete the file StartProfiler.php in your MediaWiki directory.

It turns out that even “simple” word games like Scrabble have a lot of inherent complexity. In the context of artificial intelligence, creating computer opponents that are believable is a fundamentally different problem than creating computer opponents that are optimal. In many ways, it is much more difficulty, given that humans are not particularly rational in the first place.

The game also allows us to cognitively model player actions. For example, there are a lot of interesting questions in this domain, of which I list only a small subset:

• When and why do people shuffle before selecting their final word?
• Do people change their word selection before submitting?
• When do people swap tiles?
• How often do people play optimal words? hat are time intervals between word selection?
• Can a human player identify whether their opponent is a human player or a computer?

Even data concerning user interfaces in games is not easily available. For instance, we may wish to know how often a player makes an error due to a button being to small or being placed in an awkward location. Scrabblesque allows us to perform this kind of HCI analysis.

So please help out and put some words on the board!

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