Nooo, Netflix, why must you torment me?? I got an email from them today saying that Watch Instantly now works fully on Mac, which is good news, even though I was already using the beta, because I figured they’d have a lot more Watch Instantly content. I think they do have a lot more, too, but they don’t have the one thing that matters to me: House, M.D. Looks like Jessica and I will have to keep chugging through two discs at a time with the week-long wait in between.

I had to meet with my artificial intelligence professor today to do a demo of my checkers project. The whole idea was to implement the alpha-beta pruning algorithm in a program such that the computer could pick good checkers moves to make against a human opponent, the user. My alpha-beta didn’t work so well, but the whole project was worth 250 points, 150 of which were not necessary, but just bonus points. There’s some debate over that 250, though: the project PDF actually states 200 points, with 100 being bonus, but he said in the meeting today 250. Who knows. Anyway, he thought the appearance of my program was great, which it ought to have been since I did a Ruby on Rails app and thus I had a web interface to work with; I got the full 50 points that could be won for a nice user interface. I then got 100 points for having a good heuristic function, and he said I lost 100 points for not having a correct alpha-beta function. Not having a good α-β function meant that my program was not so intelligent… The poor dear often let me win. :( However, that left me with 150 points out of 100, so I got an A and some bonus points. This allows me to skip the final and still get an A in the class, so hot dog!