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Well, the Call for Papers is out for ACL 2008 (Association for Computatonal Linguistics), which will be held in the city of my birth. Columbus, Ohio is such a short drive, it’d be a shame if I didn’t attend, even if I’m probably not submitting anything. The trick is getting someone else to pay for it!
Conference dates: 15-20 June 2008
Deadline for full papers: 10 January 2008
Deadline for short papers: 14 March 2008
The full Call for Papers is below the jump.
I really love the International Space Station (ISS). Living in the city, it’s hard to get a chance to see it in the night sky for a few reasons. City light tends to drown out dimmer objects, so later at night it’s impossible to see when passing over head. Just after dusk or before sunrise would be the best times since the space station is in the sun and you are not. This is not always the case, there are a few times a year when the ISS is in the sun during each pass throughout the night. When the ISS is in the sun, it is very bright due to all of its solar panels.
I just came across a great website that allows you to track satellites and see exactly where they are at any given time. As I right this, the space station just finished passing over Australia and is approaching the southern tip of New Zealand. The great thing about the tracker is that it ties into Google Maps, so you can see satellite imagery of the ground. There is also a Google gadget so you can add it to your iGoogle page if you so wish.
If you’ve ever played a computer at a game of chess, go, checkers, or whatever, you’ve probably wondered just what the computer was thinking. Sure you know intellectually that it can consider many times the number of moves you can in the same amount of time. But what does it dismiss and what does it look at further? How does it decide what a good move is? Of course, it depends on the system and the game and is rather complex. I have only played around briefly with trying to program such a thing. I wrote a program in C++ to play checkers that looked three moves ahead (via depth-first search) and judged the merits of a move based on the points left on the board at the end. That was back when I was first learning C++, so the code was very sloppy and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.
But on one of my random journeys through the interwebs, I stumbled upon Thinking Machine 4. It’s an online game of chess versus a computer opponent. The board is very modern looking, with polygons as pieces. Once you make a move, lines begin springing up all over the board, indicating moves the computer is considering. Depending on how hard it has to think (that is, how many possibilities it must consider), lines are thin or thick as new ones spring up. When the computer is not thinking, the board has a cool little optical illsuion to make you nuts.
