Philip and I are going to this Artificial Intelligence in Games conference down in Austin next Thursday.

Most of the programming deals with current AI trends in the gaming industry (and not approaches to classic problems in AI, such as board games). But the developer of NEAT (Neuro-evolution of Augmenting Topologies), the technique Philip and I are using as a base for our research on Go, will be there. So will his faculty advisor. We've had quite a lot of e-mail communication, but it should be interesting talking to him face-to-face.

Meanwhile, we're still plugging away at the project. I'm focusing on the distributed computing environment, learning lots about how to put together a small Linux network dedicated to distributed Java applications.

When you're working a full-time job and doing this stuff in your spare time, it's hard to put a time frame on it, but we've made a lot of good progress laying the foundation for some of the experimentation we want to carry out. I'm hoping we'll be able to carry out some actual experiments with simple game domains like Tic-Tac-Toe within the next 2-3 months.

Anyway, I'll be gone for the latter part of next week, but I'll fill you in when I get back.