Saturday, April 24, 1999

I’ve got a new story up on Papyrus. Very cool setting; I wish more writers would work with non-standard settings. I’m getting kinda tired of pseudo-medieval worlds.

I definitely plan on spending some time with Molly tomorrow, on retrieving a flying disc. The competitions are amazing; check out this photo gallery for some shots of dogs in action.

Tonight, I hope to implement a very crude AI for my IRC bot’s chess script. At the moment, only humans can play each other; I hope to add a computer opponent. Unfortunately, its strategy can be summed up as: Pick a random piece owned by the computer, and move it to a random valid spot. Hardly exciting, but I hear that that’s actually a fairly challenging strategy to beat, in some situations. We’ll see. :-)

There’s actually quite a discussion over on Slashdot about illegal copies of movies available for download from universities and such. I find it interesting that people are actually willing to download and watch them; maybe computer-based movie watching is closer than we thought. It is true that universities tend to be on higher-bandwidth networks, but on the gripping hand, universities tend to have insanely slow networks.

I can’t wait for the time when a person can put a full-length movie up on the ‘net, and actually have it downloaded by large numbers of regular people. It could open up a whole new arena of film — and just maybe one in which Hollywood doesn’t call the shots.