The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20180307132609/http://opensourcebridge.org:80/sessions/974

Shall We Play A Game?

*
Accepted Session
Long Form
Advanced
Scheduled: Thursday, June 20, 2013 from 10:00 – 11:45am in B302/303

Excerpt

In just 1.5 hours, I will help you craft a computer game AI that will consistently beat you and your friends.

Description

One of the first things people did with computers was to make them play intellectual skill games—it was such fun that we never stopped. In this interactive session (to which you must bring a laptop and strong programming skills in a programming language of your choice), we will construct a computer player for a very simple strategy game such as Goofspiel, Chomp or Hexapawn.

In just 1.5 hours, I will help you craft a computer game AI that will consistently beat you and your friends. In the process, you will learn about how computers play games, including some tools you can use to build AIs for more complicated games.

Speaking experience

I've given perhaps 50 public talks, including a half-dozen at Open Source Bridge. This talk is new, but I have taught both short (two-day and five-day) and long (eight-week and ten-week) courses in which students build computer game AIs on a regular basis for about ten years: see for example http://wiki.cs.pdx.edu/wurzburg2012 and http://wiki.cs.pdx.edu/cs542.

Speaker

  • Beach headshot 320x200

    Bart Massey

    Portland State University

    Biography

    Bart Massey has been geeking around with community computing for 35 years, and has been involved in Free Software and Open Source since its inception. For the past 15 years, he has been a CS Prof at Portland State University, where he works in open tech, software engineering, artificial intelligence and low-level software development.

    Bart’s titles include Member of the PSU MCECS Innovation Program Board and past Secretary of the X.Org Foundation Board. Bart is the architect of the X library XCB, a modern replacement for Xlib, and the author of the XCB image extension. His current open tech interests include Haskell, open hardware and building bridges between pieces of the open tech community. He was one of the original participants in the Open Source Bridge conversation.

    Sessions