Please don't take this too seriously.

[Elok]

Hmm. How to psych up to talk to the college people? I got nothin'. That's hard, when you've been putting it off.

Ideas, peanut gallery?

I don't know the specific nature of the issues, and I'm not up to going through the whole thread. Can we get a condensed version?

(I'm assuming here that it's not the same problem as last time. If it is, FFS Lori, take your meds!)

[Ben Kenobi]

Can we get a condensed version?

From what I gather, Lori stopped going to classes around march break. He needs to get the grades taken off and/or reinstated with the profs for make up work. It should be doable.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

The dummy's sized it up pretty well. Lori probably needs this semester to not count, due to his condition. He thinks that's eminently doable, but psyching up to walk into the admin building, or just talking to a few profs, is a problem.

[Lorizael]

That about sums it up. Maybe I should eat dinner.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

You've had the lifer button displaying for me all day today, BTW.

[Lorizael]

Heh. I mostly fixed the AI for my Connect Four program. The AI is very stupid for the first few moves, but if you don't trap it right then and there, it gets fairly smart. I think the problem is that it doesn't do a good job of evaluating a mostly empty board. So I have to work on the boardValue method...

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Good for you, man. It's very satisfying, solving a puzzle.

[Lorizael]

And I think I fixed the boardValue method. I ended up debugging it by hand... because I'm bored at work but don't have access to the program. That was arduous. The method looks at the last test move made by the AI; finds every horizontal, vertical, and diagonal 4-slot space (on a 7x6 board) containing the most recent move; makes sure that space contains only blank slots or other tokens of the same player; finds a value for that move based on whether the space contains 1, 2, 3, or 4 tokens of the same player; and finally adds up all the values for every one of the 4-slot spaces and returns that sum to the miniMax method (which is a recursive method for finding the least bad move the AI can make).

And I went through and debugged that by hand with a test case board typed into notepad that looks like this:

-------
-------
-------
-------
x------
o--x---

Blarg. But before I pat myself on the back, I need to actually run the program with the new method and see what variety of ludicrous errors I've managed to spawn.

[Lorizael]

Okay, it's possible that I'm not very good at Connect Four, but I can now no longer beat the computer. I've created a monster!

[Sava]

You are doing God's work.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

God will soon come to work for you.

[Sava]

in soviet russiastan

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Lori, don't listen to the Pothead. Moving to another country will just stress you out, and you know where that leads...

[Sava]

masturbation?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Well, yeah. But sullen, crying wanks.