Tuesday, January 18, 2011

BIRS Workshop, 2011

Last week I was at the Banff International Research Station for a workshop on Combinatorial Game Theory. It was excellent! I got to meet many CGT bigwigs, play a lot of great games, present some things and even prove a few things.

Here were some highlights:
  • Presenting Atropos
  • Meeting 35 new friends
  • Playing Cookie Cutter with creator Paul Ottaway
  • Listening to current NoGo World Champion, Fan Xie, explain why he was losing to Bob Hearn's NoGo program while playing it.
  • Proving something on Tuesday and seeing the result mentioned in a talk on Wednesday morning!
  • Learning to Curl
  • Witnessing Zhujiu Jiang take on eight mathematicians at once in Go. (He only lost one of the matches.)
  • Playing Games... and losing most of them.
I learned a lot, and once I sort out all my notes I'll have a number of good blog topics from the meeting.

In other news, welcome to the Spring semester! I will return to the schedule of posting Tuesdays and Fridays. As normal, let me know if there's anything interesting you'd like me to cover! :)

2 comments:

  1. What did Fan Xie said?
    How strong is he?
    How did the program worked? (Monte Carlo?)

    Can you elaborate on that ? :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I (finally) responded to this here:
    http://combinatorialgametheory.blogspot.com/2011/03/topics-for-this-semester-and-questions.html

    ReplyDelete