I finally ditched Delicious and migrated my bookmarks to Pinboard.in. There was an initial hiccup with the confirmation e-mail due to what appears to be some mail server related issues, but it was eventually resolved through IRC.

I’ve upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.3.1. In doing so, I also changed the theme to Twenty Eleven, since the prior theme has not been maintained by the original author for a long time.

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

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

I installed Weka 3, with the first hiccup being an OutOfMemoryException.

I released the final project for Database Applications. For the students, it’s the last assignment of the semester.

Our research study on Scrabblesque has gone live. Please take a few moments to play the game. You may even find that it is fun to play!

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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It appears that the Doom 3 source code has been released. DirectX continues to be one of those things that I need to pick up but haven’t yet gotten around to.

I completed the Stanford AI midterm. The difficulty was about as expected. The rest of the weekend was spent working on the server-side logic for a clone of a popular Zynga game for our research studies. It’s also a good opportunity to invest some time in learning (or re-learning) git.

Attended a seminar by Priya Narasimhan, CEO and Founder of YinzCam. Intentional or not, one of the key ideas that I took away from the seminar was that research projects should be designed for production, not simply for lab environments.