"Pell's motivation was actually not game generation, but general game playing: by the early 1990s, there was a worry that chess-playing AI had delved too deeply into special-case code that was very specific to chess."

Whereas nowadays, there's a worry that brute force solves all AI game-playing problems. If the search space is small enough, you run alpha-beta with iterative deepening and a few other tweaks. If the search space is too large for that, you run Monte-Carlo Tree Search.

I last chatted with Barney Pell at a AAAI conference in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, by that point, he had given up the METAGAME research, primarily because he couldn't get people interested in it.

Oops, ironically, here I am, a stupid American failing to see the other replies because I'm browsing at +2. Sorry.

I'm certainly not going to defend all American stupidity, but look closely at that image in particular. That's a power strip with Type E electrical receptacles, not Type A/B. The likely countries in which that picture may have been taken are Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Monaco, Poland, and Slovakia; definitely not the USA.

Zhang Shan would like to show you her Olympic gold medal in Skeet Shooting! Oh yeah, she won it in 1992, back when men and women competed together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan

In modern parlance in at least some branches of academia, "gender" refers to the male/female identity that a person has, whereas "sex" refers to the male/female biology that a person has. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction

2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission

(Dr.) Gamera: when you care enough to send the very best.

We have "energy choice" in Maryland; each customer can choose a different electricity supplier. So no, no one can tell you what percentage of Takoma Park's electricity comes from nuclear power. Certainly, I imagine they have a high percentage of customers (at least relative to other Maryland locales) choosing suppliers with 0% nuclear.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice: Standard Offer Service from Pepco is from seven different suppliers. You are welcome to chase down the nuclear percentages if you like.

http://www.pepco.com/business/choice/md/afterjune0607sos/default.aspx

In other towns, cops carry radar guns. In nuclear-free Takoma Park, they carry Geiger counters!

(Alas, not really.)

I saw Enterprise when it was still at Udvar-Hazy. I have also seen Discovery at its new home in Udvar-Hazy. I'm no rocket scientist, but Discovery was much more impressive. It... felt... like a spacecraft. Okay, now waiting for more knowledgeable people to tell me about the real differences in external appearance between Discovery and Enterprise, or alternatively, use me as an example of how external knowledge (Discovery was a real shuttle, Enterprise just a testbed) can affect perception.

Google is even more anti-Australian than anti-European! You can't even find the Gulf of Carpentaria on a Google Maps search!

It actually turns out that there is a whole naming dispute over the Persian Gulf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_naming_dispute

Google is anti-European! There's no label on the largest lake in Europe, Lake Ladoga!

Or, you know, it could be just a cartographic layout decision, just as the lack of a label on the Persian Gulf is.

You know you're a geek when you get the joke immediately because you recognize the number.

For a couple of days after we change the clocks in the spring and fall, the usual minute-long recorded message at the USNO Master Clock is shortened to thirty seconds, presumably because they are essentially getting slashdotted at those times.