Saturday 27 July 2013

AI Gone Wrong

This is a great little story I just heard about. An anonymous person posted on a forum the details of an elaborate little experiment using a video game called Quake 3 and a learning AI.

The bots in this particular game had the ability to learn effective strategies where the aim is to kill the other players and not be killed. He put sixteen of them in a match together to see how good at the game they would get, and if they would become essentially invincible against a mere human...

And he completely forgot about them. He remembered four years later, and went to check on them.

After learning, adapting, and evolving for four years, he came back to his bots and assumed something was wrong.

Thursday 18 July 2013

McDonalds Still in Tecoma

It was eight months ago that I wrote an entry regarding the state of affairs between McDonalds and a tiny little community who want nothing to do with it. If you haven't read the other post, I'll make a long story short:


For over two years now, a little town has been fighting to keep McDonalds out of their town. It started as one person with a Facebook page and a petition. It became the support of hundreds who flooded local government meetings to let their opinions be heard.

Tuesday 16 July 2013

Trend-Setting

My natural leadership has always lead to me being a bit of a trend-setter, especially with my younger siblings. I'm constantly finding people just do what I do because I'm often in a position of leadership or authority, especially children.

Even sometimes when it's related to fashion, like when I started wearing fedoras. But not like this before.

On one of the camps I spent the last two weeks on, we had a whole heap of nail polish, so the girls could get into the Christmas spirit by painting their nails green and red, gold, sparkly, etc. (It was a Christmas in July themed camp)

Monday 15 July 2013

Winter Holiday Camps

The last two weeks were right up there as two of the biggest weeks of my life, right next to my trips to Mexico and India. I spent my entire school holidays, bar three days, leading on children's camps, specifically seven to twelve year old camps.

There were two camps: in the first week I had a Christian Youth Camp on Phillip Island, nearly two hours from my home in Melbourne, and a Southern Cross Kids' Camp just across the road from my church.

Saturday 6 July 2013

Happy Birthday To Me

There's this prank we always pull on camps in my youth ministry where we choose a person, and regardless of who it is, or what day it is, during a meal on camp; we will tell everyone it's their birthday and sing Happy Birthday to them. Then for the next few hours at least, everyone will be asking if it's really their birthday.

I was on a camp last week so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to pull that one on someone. Being a new ministry, these guys hadn't seen this before, so one breakfast, I got up in front of all the campers and told them it was the director's birthday, and started a round of Happy Birthday.