Well, I know where I'm living next term.

Yeah, the script is a little precarious. Haven't yet bothered ensuring that you're looking at http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~rjbianchi/ (yeah, that exact string for Google's referal). But this way it was quick, and I need to get to bed for work. But it was fun.

Later edited to remove the link to the Google map. It won't work given the dynamic nature of the archives.

Man, what a midterm. The results just came in from my Operating Systems midterm, where the class average was 53%, and the median (which means half the marks were below it) was a 46.5%. So half the class failed. 80% of the class got a 60 or below. [Luckily im an OS nerd, so I got a 60]

I just got home (well now, maybe just is too strong a word. I recently got home) from a talk on Game Theory and how it intersects with Comptuer Science. A nifty talk, almost too short.

So my loyal reader is asking, what the hell is Game Theory? Well, its a field of Mathematics that deals with the theory of games, duh. Really though, its a way of thinking about games in a structured manner. Categorizing types of games, strategies, and resolutions. An example used in the lecture was playing Rock Paper Scissors.

Everyone knows the rules of RPS. So according to game theory, what's the optimal way of playing it? Selecting randomly between rock, paper and scissors.

You already knew that? You win a cookie. It's a poor example. What about the best next possible move in chess? A little more complicated. So the way that this is looked at in game theory is to look at all outcomes, and choose the one with the highest total utility. (You remember your economics classes, right? Utility is the measure of satisfaction derived).

Then interesting results will happen. We find games that have natural points of equilibrium, and more importantly we can devise games that have natural points of equilibrium to help us in real world situations. Detail was gone into routing, and how a router might choose a path for sending a packet, or creating a type of auction for contiguous peices of land. In a scenario where it would be more benificial to gain multiple peices of land together, rather than separate, how would you take this into account?

Kind of interested? Look to wikipedia to start. Game Theory

Well, 2B is about to begin. More or less. The good news is that I'm home. The bad news is that I've gotta start school again. I'd just wish that I could get a job to work at for 2/3 of the year and go to school for my own benifit the other 4 months. Instead it will have to work like this. While classes do start tomorrow, I'll update what classes I'm taking when I actually decide that.

Well, this has officially been one messed up term. A fire alarm went off during 3 different midterms, the power went out in the PAC at yesterdays CS241 final, and to top it all off today at STAT230, yes, another fire alarm.
Maybe someone hates me? Probably with the way things turned out. School really drags on now. Finals are worse. Ugh. When will this all be over? When can I have a few classes that interest me? Not now. Almost there? I hope.
Academic probation, here I come.

Well, the term is finally over. The kur5hin fiction contest is also over. Nobody won. None of the fiction was even sectionalized. There were some pretty good pieces as well, but I guess not.
The Machine was also down for the weekend. Magic, Changeling, and Super Mario 3 were played and good times to be had.
Finally, like the title says, the term is over. Exams start in a week. So, there's a fair amount of time beforehand of nothingness. We'll see what happens.

Well, third time this term, yes third, a fire alarm went off during a midterm. Really, I mean it's not funny. As it is the end of classes, we just went back in once the building was cleared, and wrote the test. So we got an extra hour to write it. I was still done in the original two hours anyway. Two guys said they couldn't write past 9, due to "religious obligations" so they left to work something else out with the prof.
I mise those "magic minutes" in high school though. A minute where we could just shout whatever answers we wanted at each other. Ah...St James.
With a bit of humor, the TA sent around the sign in sheet. On it were two columns, Name and Favourite Colour. Geektastic, I opted for 0x00ffff. Hexidecimal RGB values; cyan.
Oh, and CISC computers (I know the last C stands for computer, but what else am a going to say?) are rather interesting.