Happy Thanksgiving Canada!

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving. I guess this will just be another miscellaneous post. Today is Thanksgiving. Usually I am excited for this holiday since I get a long weekend off and a Turkey dinner. However, this is my first Thanksgiving without my brothers or parents so I am not doing anything. My goal for today was to study 310. I definitely am not getting too far in this goal. The only thing I have studied is the four definitions of AI, and which one we choose.

I spent the earlier part of the afternoon working on my 310 assignment. I definitely did not need to start it now but may as well get it out of the way. It wasn’t extremely difficult, just answer some questions out of the textbook on logic. This class is really good so far and one of my favourite CS classes to date. Our first programming assignment was really cool. First of all I’d like to say thanks to Cory for doing so much work on that assignment. What we were supposed to do was make a game tree, for backgammon, and look two moves ahead and decide what is the best move our agent should make. Since backgammon is a game of chance you only need to look ahead two moves, unlike games like chess where you need to think upwards of twenty (much akin to Deep Blue).

As well, a second part of the assignment was to make an evaluation function which would help the tree decide what is a good move to make. Our evaluation function was really cool as it tried to make primes to block the other player from moving. Ultimately making a greedy function that it’s only objective was to hit blots was pretty hard to beat.

Moving to the world of sports. The most exciting news. SFU beat UBC at Shrum Bowl XXXI at the last second with a field goal when there was only 2.1 seconds left. This allowed us to win 20 – 19. We are still in first place in the CIS West with a record of 5 – 2. The football team has pretty much guaranteed a spot in the playoffs for the first time in a while.

The world series is coming up. In the American League we have the Tampa Bay Rays and the Boston Red Sox currently tied 1 – 1. In the National League there is the Phillies and the LA Dodgers playing. As a Yankee fan I hope Tampa Bay beats Boston. I have no idea who will win the National League since I have not paid too much attention to them, though the Phillies have won 8 more games than the Dodgers.

In my sport of rowing things are starting to get exciting. We had the Undergrad regatta yesterday at the UBC Boathouse. SFU entered six eights of novices who ended up racing against UBC, UFV and UVic. It was a giant gongshow but SFU ended up winning first and second in the mixed eights, my cew was on the one who won second. So that was exciting. In two weeks I will, hopefully, be racing in Victoria at the Head of the Gorge regatta, in the heavyweight double category. This will be a warm up regatta as two weeks after that will be University Championships where I will also be entering in the Heavyweight double category for those sprints.

Hockey also started. Canucks played their first two games this week, both of which they won. We finally have all defence healed and healthy. Our forwards are pretty much all new so this year is going to be a bit different. I predict that we will have a better year than last year, but this is only basing on what I have seen in two games.

I am going to be starting up a new online website for a fun project. If you know what Elarune was, it will be like a new version of that site.

But now time to go back to my studying.