Saturday, January 31, 2015

AAAI15

The 29th Conference on Artifical Intelligence (AAAI15) was held in Austin last week (see http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai15.php), and since that's where I live I was able to spend some time there meeting GGP researchers who were attending, and in particular the Stanford and New South Wales teams under Professors Genesereth and Thielsche (respectively), who are behind the Coursera GGP course, which initially introduced me to the field.

I had many interesting conversations, which have left me with boosted enthusiasm for getting back to making further progress on both Sancho, and on the exploration of some new directions (which I will probably follow independently of Sancho to begin with, though they may re-integrate further down the road).

During the conference a 'grudge match' (honestly - there's no grudge!) between Sancho and TurboTurtle was held (I don't have a link for any of the games, as we did it in a fairly ad-hoc fashion, playing games people present suggested), which I think Sancho won (though I don't recall any exact score - it was more a demo-match session).  The following day, a human vs silicon competition (just a couple of games) was also held (Sancho vs attendee-victim), which Sancho won 2:0, though it should have lost the first game, as its opponent had a fairly short forced win at one point (in Breakthrough).

On the final day a brief award ceremony took place, where I received the GGP International Championship cup following last year's win (traditionally this takes place at the AAAI conferences), on behalf of Andrew and myself.

The cup in new hands:

Professor Genesereth (the handsome guy without much hair standing next to the other handsom guy without much hair!):