Please don't take this too seriously.

[Sava]

Stayed up stupid late playing Civ4 last night.

[Lorizael]

Catherine and Bismark declared war on me right when I had finally decided to go to bed (which was still ass late), so I had to stay up to see the war through. I had the tech lead, but I was caught up doing builder things and had neglected my military for a couple thousand years. I had the money to upgrade, but I just didn't have that many units to upgrade. Fortunately I'd recently switched to Universal Suffrage so I was able to start pumping out new units relatively quickly.

Still, Bismark and I have been trading Sparta for a few turns. But my second wave just arrived and I should be able to hold the city for good now. Might have to burn a city or two of Bismark's to get him to settle down, though. When I get home from work, that is. And if I don't just take a long nap, that is.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

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?

[Ben Kenobi]

I think I do pretty well for someone with so near-zero formal schooling and sub-par talent for maths.

Poster child for 'climate change'.

[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.