Tuesday Dec. 2: Prisoners' Dilemma Tourney, Heart of Stone, and Portfolio Presentations

1.     Tuesday Dec. 2: Prisoners' Dilemma Tourney, Heart of Stone, and Portfolio Presentations

a.     Woke up bright and early and put in a few hours on portfolio website.

b.     Leroy-ed my way to CSE section, then worked more on portfolio website.

c.      Went to CSE Honors section and watched RPS and Prisoners’ Dilemma bots battle it out. I don’t think our professor, who is awesome, really understood what was going on with Prisoners’ Dilemma, because he had set up the system as a zero-sum pairwise competition. The consequence of this was that the program that defected more won more, even though this behavior is suboptimal in general. When I pointed this out to him, he rewrote his program to report the final scores, but this still didn’t sum up the scores over all bot pairings. Ah well. But the RPS bots were interesting. The more patterned the bot, the more vulnerable; the more random the bot, the safer.

d.     I hustled out of class to finish my Honors Portfolio. I realized I hadn’t added my Honors 100 assignments, the only required components, and rushed to add them. (I’m beginning to think a systematic weakness (strength, in some cases?) of mine is to explore too broadly and neglect things that need to be done). During the last 20 minutes, I fell into what Patrick Rothfuss in The Name of the Wind called the “Heart of Stone”. The layers of chaos and haste fell off me, and I finished what needed to be done in a blur of clicks and navigation. I made it to class with a minute to spare, gave the first presentation—a little rushed and disorganized, perhaps, but earnest and substantial.

e.     Returned to Haggett and put the finishing touches on my website to my satisfaction. Chatted with Xin a bit and headed down to the mandatory Closing Floor Meeting. Floormates seldom seen in the lounge poured out of the woodwork in droves. Restlessness was palpable as Adam and Julia read pertinent information about closing.

f.      Afterwards, a large group went down to dinner. I invited a few Chess Club acquaintances to the table.

g.     I did physics homework for the next three hours (with a quick hoops-shooting break at Denny Field), making up for lost time. I finished up, did a blunder check, wrote this log, and went to bed.