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.

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!

Discussions

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Chad Dezern, NC Studio Director of Insomniac Games, presented on the topic of The Care and Feeding of Ideas. Insomniac Games is perhaps best known for known for their series Ratchet & Clank.

I attended a talk by Andy Wilson from Sandia National Labs. His area of interest is in graphics, visualization, and analytics.

I also attended a talk by Susan Landau regarding Surveillance or Security, and why increasing one can actually decrease the other.

For Operating Systems Security, I gave a talk on bot detection avoidance research with a focus on mimicking attacks.

I’ve found ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University to be useful so far. I also want to take a look at Foundation Game Design with Flash at some point.

Voxatron is a brand new, voxel-based, old-school-gone-new platform shooter. Pick up your trusty pea gun and shoot your way, Robotron-style, through more than twenty challenging areas filled with blocky baddies, destructible toys, and palliative powerups. The “BBS Levels” give you instant access to user-created content, and you can make your own voxel masterpieces with the Voxde level editor, included with every purchase.

It has its own level editor, which might be useful for games research.

Registered for 9 hours of CSC 893, Doctoral Supervised Research.

Today was Brewster’s first day.

• PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide, 4/E by Larry Ullman
• HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS by Patrick Griffiths

Both books are published by Pearson.

I will be retiring Don Gosselin’s PHP Programming with MySQL, 2nd Edition, at the end of this semester. His books in general appear to receive poor reviews, anyway.

The Google AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. Using one of the easy-to-use starter kits, you will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination.

I also watched the CNN Western Republican Presidential Debate, which was by far the most entertaining debate yet.

I discovered that SSH publickey authentication won’t work on NCSU’s Linux servers due to the fact that the AFS filesystem uses Kerberos. HelpDesk ticket was 1583449.

This blog is now running with mod_fcgid and suEXEC support; I’ll need to port over the remaining sites one day.

I’m also signed up for Stanford’s Introduction to AI class, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

I installed GNU Octave.

I taught a lecture for Object-Oriented Languages and Systems on Elegance and Inheritance.

I decided to be a bit nostalgic and installed TinyFugue on tango. I quickly found that many of my favorite MUDs from my younger years are still around (though barely populated with users these days), including DragonMUD and InfinityMUD. I found a few new ones as well: BatMUD and Aardwolf.

For dinner, Laurel and I went to Five Guys.