Black [X] Truder

Life is Poker, not Chess

2010-07-28T11:04:49.000+00:00

In game theory, games can be classified as being of either "perfect information" or "imperfect information". In games of perfect information, all the game data is available to all players at all times. Examples of this include Chess, Checkers and Go, where the pieces on the game board are visible to both players throughout the game and the exact outcome of every move can be determined given enough time and computational resources. Contrary to these are games of imperfect information which rely (often partially) on "hidden data" or "luck" such as most card games.

Poker is a game of imperfect information that I find very resemblant to our everyday's struggle with life. In poker, you can play with perfect strategy only to be beaten by pure luck. Although disappointing, this doesn't make the game any less interesting. Actually, this is EXACTLY what makes a game of such simple rules so thrilling and enjoyable.

Life is similar to poker in a sense that sometimes you still lose even if you play a perfect set of moves. For example, you might have worked twice as hard as any other student in high school only to find that some others have secured jobs that are far better than yours. In this case, the element of "luck" has contributed to the game result much more than your efforts.

Professional poker players understand that although you can't beat the odds at every single game, you can increase your chances of winning by perfect play and accumulate a statistical advantage over a number of rounds. It is important to understand that just because you lost a particular game doesn't mean you were wrong to play. So it is in life, one has to play as good as they can and hope that luck will roll in their favour. It is important not to look back with sorrow at any past efforts that were justified in their time but didn't yield fruit in the present. Again, just because we lost doesn't mean we were wrong to play.

Perhaps most importantly, one has to play with a solid belief that the odds are going to be in their favour one day. Only this way can one be ready to win the game when that day comes.

Fortune is when readiness meets opportunity.

Inception = Genius

2010-07-17T10:47:30.000+00:00

Just came back from watching this movie and I must say it totally rocks!

Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be going for a different kind of plots; I mean 'Shutter Island' and now this? In 'Inception', DiCaprio plays the role of professional mind-breaker or an 'extractor' who can join people in their dreams and direct the course of events to expose the secrets of the minds he's trying to hack. The twist is when DiCaprio is hired to do something of much more difficulty ... implanting an idea is somebody's mind!

When I watch a movie of this complexity it really makes me wonder whether plot writers and directors take into account the fact that if most people can't follow up on the story line and make the connections, the movie is gonna fail. The way I see it, presenting a content of this complexity on screen either assumes that the average Joe has a grasp of philosophical concepts like Brain in a vat and understand the basic reasoning behind virtualization, or that the movie is gonna play for computer scientists exclusively!

Anyways, not to say that it bothers me, au contraire I find it brilliant that a share of directors cater for those of us who enjoy complex themes. I must also express my admiration for the level of details brought up by the plot (time perception in dreams, inter-reality signaling and the butterfly effect to mention few). The director, Christopher Nolan, is also the man behind Memento and The Prestige.

Too bad I was starving and had some salted popcorn which upset my stomach. Judging by the ads it seems we're on to a lot of good movies this summer!

How to tell you need Coffee

2010-07-07T10:29:01.000+00:00

You arrive at the office in the morning, turn on your computer and while it boots you grab your mug and head to the office corner where you store Nescafe, Coffemate and sugar. You fill in the ingredients of your favorite cup of coffee, put some water in the kettle and heat it up. You then take the kettle back to your desk only to find that there's no mug.

You're really surprised ... who could have dared to touch stuff on your desk let alone take something out?

You begin to make up scenarios in which this could have happened; have you been acting extra nice to people at work so that perhaps one of them thought it was Ok to borrow your mug? did the cleaner think it was junk and threw it away? or is someone in the office trying to play some sick joke?

You panic and decide to take a look around the office to see if your precious mug lies on someone's desk or worse in some bin. Your colleagues notice you going around and ask what's going on. You tell them your mug is missing. They ask when was the last time you used it. You say you've seen it only YESTERDAY and you stayed at the office till 1am last night and was the last to leave, which means that whoever took it did it overnight.

You keep looking around till you come back to the same office corner where you store your Nescafe ... the same spot where you left your mug exactly 10 minutes ago.

Rush Hour [Game AI]

2010-06-14T04:46:52.000+00:00

Rush hour is a block sliding puzzle where the objective is to rearrange cars in a park to make way for one particular car to get out. I've installed one implementation of the game on my N900 some time ago and was tempted to do my own, perhaps with a generator. I found it a bit weird that almost all implementations of Rush Hour came with pre-built puzzles and lacked puzzle enumeration functionality (which I think would be really cool).

(Rush Hour: block/car #1 must be relocated to the right edge of the board)

I coded a little solver and a GUI frontend for the game and ran a number of experiments to generate puzzles. For my lack of knowledge of any alternative method, I've set my tool to search for puzzles by generating and evaluating random configurations. While computing solutions for Rush Hour puzzles is straight-forward, generating good puzzles is a complex problem. This is because apart from testing for the existence of a solution, the puzzle must satisfy a minimum (steps to solution) criteria. To illustrate this, consider the following state graph for a minimalistic Rush Hour puzzle:

Each randomly generated configuration represents a single state (say state R) on a graph of reachable configurations for the puzzle being evaluated. First, the graph must be traversed in full to locate all solution nodes (if there are any) and then the node which is furthest away from the closest solution node must be determined (node Q in the above example). This node will be the ideal initial configuration for the puzzle because it would maximize the number of steps required to solve the puzzle.

For the original setup of the puzzle; a 6x6 grid with cars occupying 2 or 3 blocks horizontally/vertically and with the 'special car' being placed horizontally on the 3rd row, one would be surprised to see that some configurations result in graphs with 25k+ states. Traversing such state graphs can be computationally expensive and even tricky to implement programmatically. These challenges make the following an interesting problem for a computer to tackle ...

What is the hardest Rush Hour puzzle that can be generated?

Me and a couple of colleagues at our research group were considering answering this question by brute forcing all puzzle configurations for the original game setup. However, my colleague was able to determine the number of these configurations through dynamic programming and a simple calculation revealed that it would take us about 124 years to evaluate all of them. Therefore we decided to settle for random search for the time being (any other suggestions would be appreciated).

The analysis of Rush Hour seems to have attracted some research interest with few papers being published on the complexity of the problem (example) and also some hard configurations of the puzzle being listed online (such as this list on the University of Brussels' website).

It would appear that a generally accepted definition of a 'very difficult' Rush Hour puzzle is one that needs 40+ moves to solve. Some configurations (such as the ones published by the University of Brussels) maximize the number of single-step slides (where moving a car by 3 blocks is considered 3 separate moves) but this notation isn't widely acclaimed.

I have dedicated a separate machine at work to carry on with this investigation. It has been running continuously for over a week now and has evaluated over 50 million puzzles. The tool was able to obtain a long list of puzzles that are solvable in 40+ moves (very difficult ones). The hardest puzzle that the tool was able to generate (presented below) requires 50 moves to solve. It would appear that this is the hardest Rush Hour configuration ever obtained.

(Solvable in 50 moves; arguably the hardest Rush Hour puzzle!)

En France

2010-05-11T05:59:44.000+00:00

With many bloggers coming back to life including my good friends Lubna and Zeid, I thought I might join in as well with an annual post. It really continues to amaze that despite the fact that I decided to post more often before coming to the UK, I practically stopped posting altogether (with the latest post being over a year old). I almost forgot how fun this thing was.

Many of you know by now that I've started a PhD last September. Things have been going really fast (not that they were going slow anytime before that). Starting my PhD brought along many changes in my life, many of which I'd like to talk about on this blog. Still, I have decided to postpone talking about my PhD experience and dedicate this post to share the details of my latest trip to France.

Me and a bunch of guys from our research group were attending the ASYNC2010 conference held in Grenoble, the capital of the French Alps. The ASYNC conference is one of the leading conferences in the semiconductor industry with main focus on asynchronous system design (clockless digital systems), which is a specialty of our microelectronics design group at Newcastle University. It spanned over three days where people from different parts of the world presented their recent work on asynchronous and synchronous circuit design, simulation, synthesis and verification. Some talks were really magnificent in terms of being related to some of the things am currently digging my head into. Also some other talks touched on the business side of the semiconductor industry with people sharing their experiences in starting their own small businesses.

The conference had many intermediate coffee and lunch breaks, which were a good opportunity to meet and get to the know the attendees; their backgrounds and areas of interest. We also got to try a finely chosen range of French food (I tried 10+ different kinds of cheese alone!).

In the afternoon, my colleagues and I spent our time walking around in Grenoble. This trip was my first time in Europe and it was thus quiet an experience for me to walk a European city. Grenoble is a wonderful city, full of high-tech research campuses and situated at the very edge of the French Alps. Mountains extend over the buildings' tops at every corner giving Grenoble a truely magnificent feel.

We were lucky to be invited to a very special dinner as part of the conference program. The dinner was special in a sense that the restaurant (La Bastille) was actually a renovated fortress located on a high hill that overlooks whole Grenoble. We took the cable car (the teleferique) to the restaurant were we had an amazing look on the area and surrounding mountains. Needless to say, the food there was amazing. Below are a couple of shots I took off the hill top.

On my way back to Newcastle I stopped for a couple of nights in Paris. Again like most other cities I've been to, I always start my exploration by taking a long walk on the quayside of any main river; in this case: La Seine. I had the chance to make it to the Eiffel tour, L'Arc de Triomphe, Les Champs Elysees, Le Louvre plus all the other monuments and attractions that our French teacher used to bug us about back in school.

I took a number of shots in Paris but I think it will be a waste of everyone's bandwidth if I shared a yet another photo of the Eiffel tour so I'll just skip it. Instead I'll put in two of my favorites:

I was lucky to be able to visit Paris at this time of the year; the weather was beautiful and the late sunset presented a long and seemingly non-ending soiree for a quayside walk.

I might not have had the chance to brush on my French but at least I learnt to speak English wiz a vary pro-per French axe-ent. On one of our metro rides, I started speaking with my friend in a heavy French accent till we got like 20 guys eyeballing us. My friend indirectly suggested that I'd shut up and try to pay respect to za French, perhaps because we're in their own country?

Seriously though, I found the French very kind and helpful. We didn't get anything except for good advice and a large smile from all the people we asked for directions. I must also say that they have a higher sense of humor!

That was one remarkable week that I spent. I figured that I remember more French from the school days than I thought I would. Would definitely come back on any future journeys.

Note to self: need to go back to have more cheese.

At Newcastle! - Part Three

2009-02-14T03:49:39.000+00:00

Hello everybody,

This blog has been inactive for quiet few months now and I thought it's by time I publish some news. I've been in touch with some of you, filling you in on what I've been up to so feel free to skip on the parts you know.

Many things have happened since October. After spending some time here I realized that keeping a record of my life in this place would be a far more difficult job that I imagined. I've been through a vast number of experiences; academically, socially and otherwise. It didn't take me long to realize that am probably going through the most interesting change in my life.

At the moment, am doing the second semester of my degree program. The first semester was very interesting in terms of subjects, lecturers and schedule. I enjoyed every moment of it, excluding the Christmas vacation when everybody here went back to enjoy the holidays with their families and I was left freezing :P

Despite the stacked schedule, I've been to a number of places during the first semester; notably York and Edinburgh! The latest trip to Edinburgh was magnificent in every aspect! Below are pictures of Edinburgh ...

Some of Edinburgh's Castle ...

and more of Edinburgh from the top of the castle ...

(Photos by Giùlia)

The second semester is going great so far. The courses am doing now are even more interesting than those I did during the first semester. I must say I so much enjoy doing my masters and peruse my studies in gratitude to the chances that brought me here.

Apart from my university, I get to do a whole lot of activities whenever I have the time. I can say my lifestyle has drifted considerably during my stay here. I find myself doing things I never thought I'd be capable of, also enjoying things that never made sense to me ... unbelievable!

Am also adoring the technology available at hand here. Everything starting from life at campus, government work, paying the bills, shopping and down to the simplest things such looking for a place to enjoy a Friday evening is only few clicks away.

The weather in Newcastle is fairly more pleasant than Amman. Although it can get very cold in some days, I still find it more convenient to cope with on contrast to the ridiculously-rapid climate changes in Amman!

Below are photos I've taken for my university during the recent snowfall ...

My friends in this place are adorable! Despite our different cultures, backgrounds, and interests, we still manage to enjoy each others' company and chill like life-time friends. I never bonded with anybody so firmly within months of meeting them. It is really hard to imagine parting ways with them.

Next week I'll be in London to spend a couple of days with the international students society. Chances are I might have something interesting to post about by the time I get back ...

If not ... see ya in some months :P

At Newcastle! - Part Two

2008-10-10T11:25:28.000+00:00

Sorry for the delayed post guys! Time passes quickly here :)

I've been taking lectures for the past two weeks and was given some tasks to attend to during my free time. Many things are happening around here and posting about each is pretty much impractical.

To put my news in short, I moved into a shared flat with other International students (no more stays at hotels), met a number of friends, went on a couple of trips around Newcastle, and best of all: got a broadband Internet connection at my place! :D

Anyway, here are the details, starting with the incidents that were mentioned at the end of the previous post ...

An Evening at a Bar

Victor is a Spanish undergraduate student that I met during my first week at the university. He studies music at Newcastle and has invited me to a "Jam Night" at one of the local bars. He said that this bar holds Thursday evenings for jamming sessions and that many bands and solo artists perform there every week.

I made it there that Thursday and watched some bands perform; the evening was amazing! Anybody who wants to play would simply write their names on a chalkboard and wait for their turn. The songs played ranged from country to some rock oldies, in addition to few originals.

Victor was expecting me to bring my guitar and jam along, but I told him I've been in town for a couple of days and it's not the right time ... yet ;)

Luckily, I got away with my vile no-drinking habit that evening with a simple "Sorry, I have a medical condition, I can't drink" :P

The Tap

This happened during my first week too! I was heading someplace for dinner when a girl got almost ran over trying to cross the street to my side while yelling "Hey! Hey!".

She looked terrified and asked me if I can get her "a tap". I asked her "What's a tap?" and she acted out smoking a cigarette. I figured that a tap is slang for a cigarette! She said "I can't buy it because the guy at the supermarket thinks am a minor but my 18th birthday was just yesterday!".

Now in normal conditions, if somebody approaches me with such a proposition, my reaction would range from simple refusal to beating them to death :P, but this girl really did crack me up! :D

So yes, I went to the supermarket and bought her a tap (how responsible). She gave me a pound and asked for the change but I didn't want to bother counting the pennies so I just told her "It's on me" and she was like "Ooooooh" and she hugged me :S

Of course I didn't let her go without some lecturing about the risks of smoking but she looked like a lost cause, or else I wouldn't have saved myself the hassle of denying her request.

Trip to Tynemouth

A couple of weeks ago I went with some friends to Tynemouth, a town at the mouth of the river Tyne at the east coast of England.

We passed by the historical Tynemouth Castle, a castle that stands on a high rocky cliff and is believed to have been there since the 10th century (making it 1000 years old). Anyway, embare7 wella el youm, it looked nothing more than a deserted bunch of stones to me :F

We also spent some time at King Edward's Bay.

The Tyne River

My favorite place in town is the Tyne river, I just can't get enough of it! It's great that this place is only a 15-minute walk from my university!

There are several bridges over the Tyne, some of which are high and expose wonderful scenery of the river, the town and the lands far beyond. The area around the banks of the Tyne (the quayside) has wonderful walks and is a perfect place for spending some moments of tranquility.

There are also some other places that are worth writing about but I'll leave these to other posts.

More news to followup later!

At Newcastle!

2008-09-22T08:43:38.000+00:00

Hello everybody, this is to let you all know that I’ve arrived safely and am currently doing just fine in Newcastle, UK!

My trip to Newcastle was great. I had a five-hour stop at London’s reputable Heathrow airport, one of the world’s largest airports, which was such a nice opportunity to look around. I’ve wandered for hours but couldn’t see but a tiny portion of the airport. Heathrow is so big that people use metros to travel from one terminal to another!

My flight to Newcastle was a little bit delayed so I arrived late, unpacked and fell to bed. I woke up the next morning and took a walk around, checking up the places and the routes. My WLAN-equipped mobile phone and Google Maps are really doing me a great service here; I can locate any place and determine the best route to it with only few clicks on my mobile phone! :D

Anyway, I’ve been staying in hotels ever since I arrived, looking for somewhere to stay while I finish my Masters. Today I finally signed a contract governing my accommodation for the next year; I’ll be staying in a shared flat with five other international students.

Newcastle is such a great place to live in; there are endless things that I envy the people here for; the weather is great, there are almost no traffic jams and there are many green spaces around.

The town structure is very well planned, organized and friendly for first-timers. The rules that administer this place are so sensible that breaking them will simply do nobody any good!

The town can truly be described as “International” because of the great population of International students, workers and residents. Everybody here is friendly because they all realize that they live in a city that brings together a large number of nationalities from all over the world. Even the town locals appreciate this unique feature of their city and are actually happy about having such a variety of people around.

Anyway, I still have a couple of interesting “incidents” that I want to tell you about, in addition to the university … oh the university! (needs a post on its own!) but I’ll leave these for the next posts!

Upcoming events …

Ghaith gets invited by a Spanish guy to a Thursday evening in a bar and he comes over. What happens?

Ghaith is wondering around in a desolate part of the city at night and a girl gets almost ran-over trying to get to him from the other side of the road while yelling “Hey! Hey!”. What does she want?