Tomorrow is the actual Roomba race

On thursday at 13 pm (helsinki time), the annual (this is the first year) Roomba artificial intelligence robot race will be held at the department of computer science at the univerity of helsinki.

You can follow it on the net

• here is the official race page
• The races can be viewed from here (if you have realplayer or quicktime), you will see me.
  • you can log in with the Conference-Id: 3031 (the other fields are left blank)
• Here you can see the what the onboard cameras see
  • if you encounter “Internal server error” during the race, just refresh the page
  • If you increase the fontsize of the browser (ctrl +), the images also get bigger
  • i recommend to have both the onboard cameras/scoring table plus the live stream visible
• Here are the starting positions of the cup
  • We are group nr 10
  • We start against group 7, they performed really well

Although, i must add that when we tried to fix a couple of bugs this morning (our last chance to make changes) we just messed it up more. So i just changed it back to yesterdays settings (thank God for version control), and made a couple of changes “in blind” because we can’t test it. So tomorrow will either be a complete success or failure for us. So if you want to see a humiliated, or happy Toffe tomorrow, check it out.

The counsellor that is always there

If you look carefully you see that this is posted under “nerd stuff” so the counsellor is not who you think it is. But i must add that the one you think i’m talking about IS always there for you.

I am talking about my Eliza program.
We had a howework assignment in the Artificial Intelligence course to implement our own Eliza.
Eliza was a program in the sixties that simulated a therapist who you could talk to by writing text, and the program talked back.
Some people actually belived that there were a real person “on the other side” talking to them.
But it was only a verys simple program that followed certain rules.

Anyway, here is a link to my own implementation of eliza

If you get a really funny conversation with it you can copy paste the dialogue and add it as a comment to this post. (No obscurities though)

(i can add that this eliza tries to take the client through the learning circle)