Everything's funnier when you haven't slept

Ragtime was really the highlight of my weekend. It was fun, albeit ridiculously crowded. Come on, people, Big Game weekend isn't for dancing, it's for getting drunk, defacing public property, and rioting. When will you learn?

Ragtime was also the only time I emerged from my room, save for eating and my Lair hours. Mr. Othello and I were having some quality moments.

Saturday, 3 1/2 hours.
Sunday, 3 hours.
Monday, 1/2 hour.

OK, so I ducked out of our all-night mad coding party to go stop by a neighbor's party. It really amazes me how some people can't even conceive of having to do work on a weekend. (I've long since gotten over the fact that some people never seem to have this problem... but it seems you'd have to have a pretty narrow social crowd not to be aware of this.)

What really irks me though, are the people who think engineering is some sick addiction, that we really do want to spend hours on end parked in front of our computers and problem sets. We're people too, dammit... and it's not that we don't want to have lives.

That takes care of rants for the weekend. Today Othello was due at noon, thus ending our computer-shackled bondage. We'd all gotten together for one last coding party and we'd all gotten so little sleep we were getting to the point where anything was funny. So around 11, we make the discovery that our AI player gets completely wiped out, spectacularly losing on some of the test cases we're graded on. Naturally, with the deadline approaching we all start freaking out, frantically digging through our project to find any blaring bugs. At 11:55 we decided to replace our training weights, the results of a week's painstaking work, with the hand-tuned weights Guy randomly chose a week ago. But it still didn't seem to be working. Panicked, we submitted and went to lunch, thinking we had just bombed big time on this project.

So imagine our surprise when we go to examine what we did wrong and find out... we were looking at the wrong side! We'd gotten all worked up about the fact that Red was losing 0-91 and forgot that, well, we were White. And those random weights? In ten seconds, Guy had outfoxed three days' worth of reinforcement learning.

In short, it all comes down to this: machine learning is only better than human learning because machines don't need sleep...