"Epic Movie? More like Epic Fail!"*

I really enjoy going to the cinema. I love being overwhelmed by the big screens and hearing how other people react to a film. I even kind of enjoy that slightly nauseous feeling I get after leaving the theatre having gone through a fountain sprite and bag of gummy bears (note, I am a firm believer that this feeling is part of the experience).

But, there are also only so many hours in the day and so much money in my pocket. Which are just some of the reasons I have always found a certain set of movie critics quite valuable.

I say certain set because I don't find all critics valuable to me personally. It is not because they are poor writers or bad critics, its just that they don't help me pick movies to watch. In some sense, I look for critics that have similar sensibilities as I do, this way I know that if they liked a film, I probably will too.

Another important function that movie critics serve involves highlighting lesser known films that I might otherwise miss. I always enjoy being surprised by a film, and so throwing a little less conventional fare into the mix is always helpful - particularly if it is suggested by a source I trust.

With these ideas in mind, I have been thinking about helping to populate this corner of the internet with a few movie reviews of my own. If you are reading this blog, you almost certainly know me personally and so probably agree with me on at least some aspects of movie-watching taste. Perhaps you will find these reviews useful. And if you don't, you are free to share regarding where our opinions differ. Or mock me as is probably more likely.

Anyways, before I write anything of my own, I thought I'd share a lineup of critics and movie sites I usually pay attention to. The first is Brian D. Johnson who writes for Maclean's. I initially became a reader mostly because my parents used to have a Maclean's subscription. However, I find of all critics I have encountered, his interests lie closest to me. He also tends to spotlight Canadian filmakers I might otherwise miss due to the poor job that we as a nation do of celebrating our own films. You can check out his work on his blog.

Keeping with the Canadian theme, I also like the work of Alan Bacchus at Daily Film Dose. He has been writing that blog for a few years now with the idea being that he publishes a movie review every day. He is also not a bad ballplayer, which I know first-hand having played against him in a men's league a few years back.

Mostly due to the fact that I spend quite a bit of time scouring Slate, I have also gotten into the habit of checking out the work of Dana Stevens. Of all the people listed here, I probably agree with her the least, but its nice to have a contrasting point of view. I ain't just lookin' for yes men in my critic blog-roll.

I am also pleased that Will Leitch has started routinely adding movie reviews to his site. I still don't know what a Tumblr blog is, but I like this one. Leitch is much more famous from his work in the sports blogosphere, but I find his movie articles quite perceptive. I certainly appreciate the fact that everything he writes emanates how much he enjoys doing what he is doing.

Finally, I have recently been getting into Roger Ebert's site which certainly offers a lot more than just movie reviews. He certainly knows what he is talking about and has a wealth of information there on the site that I'm sure, at the very least, will help you procrastinate.

So stay tuned for some of reviews which I hopefully will eventually write. I expect that I won't just tackle new films, as I plan to mention some older movies that catch my eye as well. After all, that is what rental stores are for.

* Note, I did not actually see Epic Movie and never intend to do so. I don't usually like judging a movie completely by its trailer, but that movie just looks awful. If I ever do see Epic Movie, I can only imagine it is because I am being tortured or lost a bet. Anyways, I just thought this was a hilariously terrible headline for a review of that movie. A quick google search shows that I am not the only one who thought of this tagline. I think that is a good sign that I will not be adding anything particularly noteworthy to the world film criticism.

On Cannibalism

A lot has happened since I last wrote something on this here blog. The Jays started playing terribly and ditched Rolen and Rios. I took a 2 and a half week vacation in Toronto. I went to the Edmonton Folk Festival. My bloody Master's thesis keeps on dragging on.

I'll cover some of these topics and others in the future, but probably won't be able to write longer pieces for a few weeks (much to your surprise I'm sure). However, on the advice of a wise man, I will try to use this space as a way to clear my head of science when I find myself stuck during my thesis writing. These posts will be shorter and more comedic (at least, that will be the attempt) than most of my work in the past. This is one such post.

A friend of mine has been trying out the online dating scene and recently joined a new site which tries to match people based on the results of a survey. I have no idea if this is the site often advertised on the television; I have not asked. What I do know is that one of the questions in the survey he completed is as follows:

If you were offered the opportunity to eat human meat prepared any way you like, would you at least try it?

* Yes
* No
* Only as a last resort for survival.

Now this question is hilarious for a myriad of reasons, including a large number of inside jokes that I will not go into here. However, something about that last selection struck me because of the stated opportunity to have the "human meat prepared any way you like." How exactly would this situation come about?

I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately goes to planes crash-landing in the Andes when the topic of cannibalism comes up*. Apparently, planes never crash in any other mountain ranges, or at least no other mountain ranges inspire cannibalism. Anyways, let us run with the Andes situation for the moment.

As the survey question allows us to have the human meat anyway we want, clearly one of our fellow passengers - specifically the non-dead ones, although I suppose we might only be able to count on our undead fellow passengers - must include say, the Iron Chefs. And when the Iron Chefs travel, they (obviously) bring along all necessary spices and cooking apparatus with them in case of such an emergency. As such, our (possibly zombie) Iron Chef friends have access to a fully functional stove, grill, deep-fryer, etc. and an army of assistants (who may or may not also be zombies). This assortment of apparatus were unharmed in the plane crash. Since they can't run on electricity, they must all run on propane, of which there is an abundance (it is preposterous to believe otherwise). The Iron Chefs, because of their love of cooking, will then happily make you a four or five course meal of your choosing, with the not so secret ingredient of human flesh. Personally, I would avoid the flesh of the undead (except perhaps as a garnish), but you are free to do as you like.

Regardless, I think that we have answered the question of whether a situation may arise in which you have to eat human meat to survive but are given the option of eating it in any way you want, with a resounding yes. For any employee of the aforementioned dating site who stumbles across this blog post (or perhaps is already one of my many many readers), I offer a pre-emptive "you're welcome" for devising a situation that will help you make your survey question more concrete. You should start mailing me the royalty checks as soon as possible. Same goes for anyone who wants to make my "zombie Iron Chef crash-landed in the Andes cannibal" story into a movie. Keep in mind, the existence of this blog post will make any lawsuits really easy.

* Note: this assertion is not completely true. I often think of a particular Kids in the Hall sketch seen here.

Only In California

I am going to get into other tales from my trip to Pasadena later, but I wanted to give a quick update on one of my adventures in Southern California. As part of the conference, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) hosts a video competition with the goal of encouraging students to enter into a career in AI research. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I was part of a video about a system that interprets motions made with a Wiimote. This film had been made so as to be entered into the competition and ended up being nominated for the Best Short Film Award. As the creator of the film could not be there, I was designated as his proxy since I was attending the conference.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I have officially appeared in an award winning short film. It is an accomplishment that I am now going to add to resumes and business cards. As the proxy, I was also entrusted with the task of saying a 30 second speech. Since I did not expect we would win, it ended up coming something like this:

"Michael (the video director) couldn't be here today, and so he sent me in his place. He didn't tell me what he wanted to say, so I am just going to assume that he would have thanked Ricardo who built the WiiGesture system with him, and me, for appearing in the film. Thanks."

Anyone who knows me is probably also aware that there were a lot of "ummm"s and "ahhh"s thrown in as well.

Live From Pasadena, it's Rick Velanzano

I am currently in Pasadena at the General Game Playing Competition. The competition is held as part of a workshop at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). And my name has been misspelled on my name tag.

General Game Playing is part of a push towards constructing general machine reasoning systems. The idea is to construct a program that can reason about the task at hand and devise a strategy to do it well. The field of games used as a test bed because a large number of tasks can be expressed in this way, and competition offers a simple well to compare alternative approaches.

Artificial intelligence researchers have had tremendous success in developing programs that perform specific games at a world-class level. The classic example was Deep Blue which bet the world-champion Chess champion Gary Kasparov. At the University of Alberta, we have one of the strongest games research group in the world and some of our more public successes include the construction of a program, Chinook, which is not only world-class at Checkers but provably can never be beaten. Our Computer Poker Research Group also constructed a program, Polaris, that has shown capable of defeating world-class poker players over a large number of heads-up limit hold'em matches. Oh yeah, and I was not involved in either of those projects.

However, these programs are limited in that they are specific to the exact game they were designed to play. These programs can playing arbitrarily poorly if even even slight modifications are made to the game, like changing the way a knight moves, changing the size of the board, or changing the number of players. On the other hand, humans are much better at handling such game changes.

In comparison, general game playing programs are expected to play a large variety of games, and actually only get the games rules immediately before the game is to begin. The game then consists of two phases: the initial "thinking" phase, during which the program has an opportunity to analyze the game descriptions; the game-play phase, during which players are required to make a move ever so often (the time changes depending on the game).

Anyways, I will be updating this page over the next week with updates on how the conference is going and how we did in the competition.

UPDATE: The competition started with two divisions of 4 players. We came second in our division and are off to the finals with 3 other teams. We also just got killed when we tried to play Sudoku.

UPDATE 2: Well, the competition is over and we ended up coming in third. We were a little disappointed because we missed out on second by the smallest of margins (it came down to how the numbers were rounded), and the fact that we had some trouble with a program on some of the games. Regardless, we are pleased with the result and despite a few hiccups, were much happier about the way the competition was run this year.

My Acting Pedigree

For a course project, a friend of mine built a Wii Gesture Classification system. The idea is that during game play, a user will perform actions with the Wiimote which have to be identified by the game and translated into actions by a game character. These actions have to be classified properly. For example, consider a baseball game in which a full swing needs to be distinguished from a bunt.

The difficulty with building such a system is that fact that there will be a significant amount of variation in the way different people will try to perform the same action. For example, people swing a baseball bat in many differenet ways, and even do so from different sides. Moreover, as different games will require different action sets to classify, it would be nice to have a system that could be re-used in multiple games without much effort.

My friend's system is trained through the use of examples. To do so, a number of people perform the desired actions. The system then attempts to generalize from these training examples to a more general idea of the actions. The resulting model is then used to classify actions by a game player.

This is all a long-winded way of getting to the point that it is a cool system, he made a demo movie of his software for the 2009 AAAI Video Competition, and I am in it. In the video, my friend shows the system classifying actions in real-time. Since I can't resist the allure of movie-making, I volunteered to be one of the test subjects.

Anyways, here is the video:


You can also find contact info if you are interested in the system at the following link: http://wiigesture.com/

An Update

Since I am currently writing my thesis during the day, I find I am less inclined to come home and write on this here blog. Hopefully I will be able to satisfy my legions of fans until July when I will be more interested in writing. Until the next time I feel obligated to write anything, I leave you with the following updates/observations.

I will begin by saying that I have decided to grow a thesis beard. Specifically, I will not shave until my thesis writing is complete. There are a number of reasons for this decision. First, thesis writing is like the playoffs of a graduate degree. Secondly, looking in the mirror will be a constant reminder of how lazy I am. If I had finished my thesis sooner, I wouldn't look this bad. This should provide extra motivation for finishing as soon as possible.

Finally, the thesis beard will allow me to officially be better than Sidney Crosby at something. He has millions of dollars, is a world-class athlete, and is well-spoken. I am none of these things. But at least for the next few years, I can still grow a better beard than him. Sure, I assume I am better at mathematics and computer science than he is, but I don't know for sure. He may just be hiding those skills. However, concerning beards, I have him beat. At least for now.

A second update: I have run out of toothpicks. When I arrived in Edmonton 20 months ago, I purchased 500. Today, I ran out. Considering that I did not spend that entire time in Edmonton, I am guessing I am going at about a toothpick per day pace. Make of that what you will.

Another Short Post

During a conversation with a friend, I realized that the fact that I enjoyed being a catcher for so many years may mean that I fundamentally like having things thrown at me. Not that this is an invitation.