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UIUC Holds 10th annnual Reflections | Projections

Posted by michael on from the free-t-shirt dept.

dkaplan1 writes "ACM@UIUC will be holding their 10th annual Reflections | Projections Midwest computing conference on October 22-24. The 3-day event will feature a job fair and numerous speakers including: Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, Andrea Pessino who worked on Warcraft 3, and many others. And be sure to check out MechMania, an intense C++ AI programming contest. Registration for the conference is $20 for meals and a t-shirt. Please visit www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference for details."

8 comments

  1. This conference is SEXIST... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See here: http://www.aahhh.org/article.php?story=20041013212 64048

  2. "an intense C++ AI programming contest" by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm surprised that they're not using Ruby, Java, or Python for this... seems like those languages might lend themselves a bit more easily to something like this.

    In fact, the first thing I thought about when I saw this was IBM's Robocode framework - which is in Java.

    --
    The Army reading list
    1. Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest" by N1ck0 · · Score: 1

      I have nothing against Python, Ruby, Java, etc...but they weren't all that in 1995 when Mechmania started, and most of the classes at the time were, and still are, C/C++ based. Not that change is a bad thing, we've concidered it before...BTW usually calls to any external libraries are allowed. Mechmania Coordinator Emeritus, -Nicko

    2. Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest" by tcopeland · · Score: 1

      > in 1995 when Mechmania started

      Ah, OK, that makes sense.

      > usually calls to any external
      > libraries are allowed

      Cool, thanks for the info!

      --
      The Army reading list
    3. Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest" by kupci · · Score: 1

      Really? I'd think the opposite. Most games *are* written in C++ for one thing, although Java seems to be making some inroads in the mobile phone games market. Also, there was a recent TopCoder contest, i.e. a similar programming contest, in which the programmer who won used C.

    4. Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest" by tcopeland · · Score: 1

      > Most games *are* written in C++

      Sure, yup, production commercial games are written in C++, I agree.

      I guess I found it surprising because I thought the emphasis would be more on the AI side of things, not the performance side. I thought that one of those more dynamic languages would lend itself more easily to that sort of thing... so programmers could concentrate more on, say, squad tactics, and less on pointer twiddling.

      But Nicko's explanation (see his reply to my earlier post) makes sense - they've been running the contest on C++ since 1995, so it makes sense to carry on with it.

      --
      The Army reading list
  3. Review of the conference by generationxyu · · Score: 1
    I come from UIC, sister campus of the honorable UIUC. We got down to Chambana at about 5:30 Friday, and didn't do much that night, as all the Friday events were over. Saturday we heard Charles Leiserson from MIT talk about shared-memory multiprocessing in the Cilk language, that the MIT AI lab came up with. It was very interesting, especially the charts and raw numbers... the best performance they got was from the 8 queens problem. Running on one processor, it took T1 seconds (I forget the exact figure). Running on 8 processors, it took exactly T1/8 seconds. Absolute parallelism...

    After lunch, we saw Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He seems like a really great guy... a millionaire from the futures and options market deciding to devote his life and fortune to amassing the sum of human knowledge in one central, but not controlling place.

    Later Saturday night, we went over to the HOL (House of Leet) for a conference party they were throwing. I think I spotted Brad Kuhn, the executive director of the FSF, and I know for a fact that Ari, the maintainer of SourceForge, was DJing the party. root@sf.net spinning for a bunch of nerds... what a sight.

    Sunday we saw Phil Zimmerman's talk. He started by saying that there was no reason for him to explain the technical basis behind PGP, because everyone pretty much knew what it was. So the whole talk was mostly about his legal battles getting PGP out in the world, getting it through customs without getting put in jail, etc. I thought it was specifically interesting that in order to get PGP 2.6.2 distributed worldwide, they had MIT Press print the source code in a very OCR-readable font, with checksums on every line, a rolling checksum for all previous lines in the page, and an MD5 for every file to simplify error correction. Books, apparently, can be exported, disks with source code cannot.

    Finally, we got to see the final showdown of MechMania X. The teams had been coding for 24 hours, with only a 5 hour break from the labs. Despite some problems with the visualizations (they were testing an OpenGL one that looked really cool but didn't work very well), it was pulled off quite well. Some of the teams did nothing, or had bad logic that ended up killing themselves, but some were really interesting. Once a team won a match, the ships would inevitably do some sort of crazy dance, not having any idea what to do, since there was no longer anything to do...

    It was a fun weekend. I would highly suggest attending next year's conference. Check http://acm.uiuc.edu for more information about the conference and the ACM.

    --
    I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.