News You Can Bruise for 2009 August 25 (entry 0)

(4) Tue Aug 25 2009 22:11 Time For Some Links: There's been too much original writing on this weblog recently! Time for some lazy linking to other sites.

I mentioned in my Wii Fit entry that I'm jogging 60-90 minutes a day while watching Internet videos. That's a lot of videos, folks. I've gone through Chrontendo, twice. I've seen pretty much everything on TGWTG. Sixty Symbols lasted me about three days. I need videos, folks. Give me your favorites in comments. I don't have enough to fill the gaping foot-pounding void of exercise. Preferably videos that are at least ten minutes long, because I can't be using the keyboard all the time while jogging. Meanwhile, podcasts have been accumulating because if there's no visual component I'm not distracted enough to forget about the mind-crunching boredom of exercising.

One of my favorite CS papers is 1984's ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, which describes a script that plays Rogue better than human players. You can get the source code, but good luck getting it to run. The Angband Borg works great--I remember leaving it running over an afternoon while in college--but because Angband is a game that rewards grinding, the Angband Borg loves to grind. It's incredibly dull--and the Borg isn't too exciting either! (I'm here all week!)

But now I've found out about TAEB::AI::Planar, an experimental AI player for Nethack. Compare that weblog post to the Rog-O-Matic paper and see how much the state of the art has changed since 1984. Don't miss the list of YASDs to which Planar is prone. You can even watch Planar in action (just not while you run, it's only 3 minutes).

Comments:

Posted by rachel at Wed Aug 26 2009 06:09

i find jogging time useful for fiction plotting

Posted by dave at Wed Aug 26 2009 06:15

TED Talks (inspirational lectures from famous faces)

http://www.ted.com/

Consolevania (daft show about Video games, written by Scottish sit-com writers who happen to love video games)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolevania

Downtime Town (similar to above but about board games)

http://www.downtimetown.com/

Posted by rachel at Wed Aug 26 2009 16:55

mary kay the musical! i love it!

Posted by Brendan at Fri Aug 28 2009 00:50

Lately on lunch breaks I've been reading the AV Club's ongoing review/deconstruction of NewsRadio and then watching the corresponding episodes each week. The column's on hiatus now, but there's a couple seasons of archives, and the shows are readily available.