Okay, so it’s been a while since I posted anything. Last weekend, sunshine and I went to Seattle to get away from things. I will talk about it more in a separate post, but we had a good time. There’s a lot to talk about, so I’ll reserve that for a dedicated post.

Lately, I’ve been holed up in my office working on my AI project. We have been tasked to play a game of 9 Men’s Morris. This is basically an ancient version of Tic Tac Toe. The branching factor on this game is significant enough to warrant the intelligent searching algorithms we’ve learned in class. I am working mine in Perl and have about 85% complete. I haven’t performed any performance enhancements yet which has left it running for 1:24:36 so far analyzing a ply of 7. With a ply of 6, it only took 20 minutes. I haven’t applied alpha-beta pruning (which is part of the assignment), so I expect that to significantly drop the run-time. Anyways, I hope to post that project on CPAN eventually, so other people can work on variations of the game.

I spent a few minutes the other day and worked on the archives page. Right now, it looks like a much better way of sifting through the old postings here on zero-blog. When I finalize the style, I’ll remove the category and archive listing on the sidebar and try to add something more useful (or nifty). No progress on the photo album though as I grew extremely frustrated with uploading the photos 5 at a time since doing a whole album times out the PHP runtime. I’m trying to pump the f-spot guys to creating an output plugin for WordPress.

Lastly, I went on a long run with the usual suspects yesterday (I’ve switched to Saturday for long runs) and ran a complete 10.1 miles. That is officially the longest I’ve run consecutively and the first time I ever broke double digit miles. I’ve read about people who have done this for the first time and they were completely right. Afterwards, I felt like Superman. It was the greatest reward in my running since I was able to complete a 5K. On top of that, we took the clockwise loop around White Rock Lake, which is not an easy task, and my time was still around what I would expect it to be for such a distance. I have 2 races coming up, so this is the best thing to get me mentally into the race.

Spring break ends today, so I have to get back to working on my project while I have the time. I’ll post the aforementioned posts when I get the time.