[Year 12 SofDev] Melbourne University Seminar: ``150 Students Can't Be Wrong! GamesCrafters, a Computational Game Theory Undergraduate Research and Development Group at UC Berkeley''

[Steven Bird]

Dr Dan Garcia (UC Berkeley) ``150 Students Can't Be Wrong!
GamesCrafters, a Computational Game Theory Undergraduate Research and
Development Group at UC Berkeley''

When: Tue Nov 13 12pm - 1pm

Where: Theatre 3 (Room 2.05) ICT, 111 Barry St, Carlton

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Abstract:

The UC Berkeley GamesCrafters research and development group was
formed in 2001 as a ``watering hole'' to gather and engage top
undergraduates as they explore the fertile area of computational game
theory. At the core of the project is GAMESMAN, a system developed for
solving, playing and analyzing two-person, abstract strategy games
(e.g., Tic-Tac-Toe or Chess). Given the description of a game as
input, our system generates a text-based and Tcl/Tk graphical
application that will strongly solve it, and then play it
perfectly. Programmers can easily prototype a new game with multiple
rule variants, learn the strategy, and perform extended analysis. Over
the past six years, more than seventy games have been integrated into
the system by over one hundred fifty undergraduates, with still more
games in development. Our future research direction is ``hunting big
game'' -- implementing, solving, and analyzing games whose perfect
strategy is yet unknown.

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Bio:

Dan Garcia is a Lecturer SOE in the Computer Science Division of the
EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined
the Cal faculty in the fall of 2000. He has won the departmental Diane
S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002, the departmental
Information Technology Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate
Teaching in 2004, and was chosen as a UC Berkeley ``Unsung Hero'' in
2005. He recently earned the highest teaching effectiveness ratings in
the history of the department's lower-division introductory courses
(tied with one other at 6.7 / 7). He has taught (or co-taught as a
graduate student instructor, where he won both departmental and campus
outstanding GSI awards) courses in teaching techniques, computer
graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, self-paced programming
as well as the lower-division introductory curriculum. He is active in
SIGCSE, and serves on the ACM Education Board as well as BFOIT, a
wonderful Berkeley outreach effort.

When not on sabbatical (as he is this Fall of 2007 at the University
of Melbourne), he mentors over seventy undergraduates spread across
four groups he founded in 2001 centered around his research, art and
development interests in computer graphics, Macintosh OS X
programming, computational game theory and computer science
education. He also recently co-developed a computing course for all
freshman engineers. Dan received his PhD and MS in Computer Science
from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 1995, and dual BS degrees in Computer
Science and Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1990.


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