Monday (yesterday now) was the excursion. There was lots of things planned for the day; meals and bus rides all over Kanazawa. Unfortunately I had decided the night before to not go, and instead stay at the hotel and work in preparation for the game against Rybka on Tuesday. After all, I came here to play chess. I had quite a lot of work to, trying to prepare my cluster version (that uses multiple machines over a network, rather than just one machine). I had started on this project a very long time ago, but then shelved it for a while. I started over about two weeks before the tournament with a new and simpler method. It hadn't yet been working, so I spent all day fixing bugs and such. I took one break to go down to Starbucks and get a sandwich. I ran into Kerwin Medina, one of the programmers of Thinker. He had just come out of Starbucks as well, and he also had skipped the excursion to work out some issues with his program.
I also ran into Maarten Schadd at the hotel, a student from the Netherlands. I recognized him from the playing hall, but wasn't sure who he was. He happened to have operated Zappa (predecessor to Rondo, before I took over) in Amsterdam for the 2007 championship. He was here this year to present a paper in the computer games conference (a very interesting sounding paper that I will surely read in the near future), and also to operate a draughts program (big version of checkers). There were only 2 draughts programs this year, so it was a quick championship--the program Maarten was operating lost. Maarten was a very nice guy, and we had a little chat. He was quite enthusiastic and friendly, so I didn't mind at all taking a few minutes to chat with him in the hotel's business center (aka wifi room).
After a while, I was getting quite tired. Around 1:30 AM I mailed a version out to Suj (Rondo's hardware guy) that seemed close to bugfree. I still had some work to do, so I planned to wake up very early and get going before the Rybka game at 9 AM. I was too tired to stay up, and Suj was at work anyways so couldn't run any tests.
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