Month: August 2004

  • A Cavity?

    I have a weird sensation in the upper right part of my mouth that could be a cavity. The weirdest part is that it’s not sensitive to eating, or cold, but I can “feel it” in my mouth when I step heavily. Some sort of bone conduction effect, at any rate. I figure the possibilities…

  • In The News

    I got interviewed for a longer newspaper article about the robots last Thursday, just before leaving for a family vacation in Michigan. The final article appeared in the Star Tribune this past Wednesday. I thought the interview went really well; it was a lot of fun, actually. I talked to the reporter for about half…

  • Riven

    For some reason, I do not have Disc 2 of Riven. This makes the game non-functional. I don’t know what happened to it; all I can figure is that I lent the game to someone at some point, and it came back incomplete. I don’t know how else just one disc would have walked off.…

  • Moving Out Martini

    So it turns out that a martini is pure alcohol. Who knew? It made moving seem effortless, at any rate. Just to stave off the accusations of unnecessary drunkenness, the occasion was a martini party to celebrate ‘s new employment after almost a month of unemployment. He is known for his abilities as a bartender,…

  • Ego-Googling

    Packing’s coming along nicely, so as a brief procrastination, I decided to see what news I could find about the robots online: Mercury News has an article in several papers: http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/business/technology/9300340.htm I contest the description of our robots as “vacuum cleaners that had been topped with cameras and microphones”. Hmph. Stupid iRobot. Stupid Roomba.

  • AAAI ’04 – Victory

    As you probably already heard, perhaps in Fritz’ LJ entry, or on the Swarthmore home page, we won the Urban Search & Rescue competition. We didn’t just win; we kicked some serious smart people ass ;o). We set a record score for the competition (almost 36 points over 6 rounds). We doubled the second-place team’s…

  • AAAI ’04 – Final Rounds

    As I mentioned in my previous post, we didn’t get that many points in the first of our final rounds. We won’t be able to see our detailed score analysis for a while, because the final day on Wednesday was too packed for the NIST team to do anything else, particularly since they were busy…

  • AAAI ’04 – Preliminary Rounds

    Just as we experienced last year in Acapulco, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference is a time for very little sleep, very good food, and more coding in a 5-day period than should be humanly possible. My body clock feels like I’m running on Mars time or something. Speaking of which, there’s someone…

  • A Flurry of Posts

    I’m packing up my room at this point. I’m also posting some entries I wrote last week during the USR competition at AAAI ’04. They were written during the event, so the point of view is probably a bit skewed. Sorry for the delay, but I’m busy, busy, busy!