In How To Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 4 – Reinforcement Learning) we looked at training a reinforcement learning agent to learn to play Camel Up. There was a problem. Our agent was getting too bogged down in the details! Today, we’re going to fix this and help the agent learn 120 times faster!… Read more: How To Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 5 – Reinforcement Learning State Space Optimization)

I had the privilege of attending PyCon AU in Melbourne over the 22nd-24th November 2024. After my experience at PyCon US I was excited to attend the Australian version for the first time. In this article I’ll discuss my experience, how it compared to the US version, and some constructive feedback for the PyCon AU… Read more: PyCon AU 2024 Recap

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the board game Camel Up. If you’ve missed it – check out the series starting here: How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up. One observation from my last article about reinforcement learning was that the number of game states is very large. This means our… Read more: How Many Ways Are There To Arrange Some Camels?

Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed our session on CUDA! Missed it? Catch up here: How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 3 – CUDA Baby!). If you’ve missed the whole series so far, start here: How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up! This is a continuation of our series on how to become… Read more: How To Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 4 – Reinforcement Learning)

Welcome back to another article in our series on winning Camel Up! If you’ve missed part 1, part 2, or our code review, you can find them here: How to Beat Your Dad at Camel Up / How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 2) / How To Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Interlude… Read more: How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 3 – CUDA Baby!)

Welcome back! This is a small technical interlude in our series on Camel Up. If you’re not up to date, you can find parts 1 & 2 here: How to Beat Your Dad at Camel Up / How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 2). Camel Up is a board game about betting on camels… Read more: How To Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Interlude – Code Review)

This is part 2 in a series about learning the deeper mysteries of Camel Up to prove my dad wrong. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find part 1 here. Welcome back! I hope you’ve been applying our takeaways from the last deep dive! Today we’re going to turn up the heat and… Read more: How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up (Part 2)

“I like that he’s having fun. I just need him to know how wrong he is.” Mr GrumpyKitten Introduction My dad loves Camel Up. Seriously, this is a game that has brought him countless hours of joy. Despite our expensive game collection, it’s the one that he always requests. For most Millennials obsessed with games… Read more: How to Beat Your Dad At Camel Up

I was lucky enough to go to PyCon US 2024, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from May 17-19. A long trip from my usual home in Melbourne, Australia! Getting There I flew from Melbourne to Pittsburgh via San Francisco on United Airlines. I had a very long stopover in San Francisco, about 14 hours, so I… Read more: PyCon US 2024 Recap

It’s that time of the year again – final exams have rolled around and, as a tutor, I’m sitting around marking them. Exam marking can be an extremely depressing or entertaining process, depending on the state of mind and quality of the exams being marked. I thought it would be interesting to document here my… Read more: Errors that students make in introductory statistics

I have always thought that Australia has had a perfect electoral system, at least for the House of Representatives. Compulsory ranked voting with instant run-off? What’s not to like?! The electorate is forced to show up once every four years and have their say, and no-one’s vote is wasted, or so I thought. I was recently made aware of two theorems in social decision theory, Arrow’s Theorem, and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, that have made me more uneasy about our voting system, and voting systems in general.

I was watching an episode of Penn and Teller Fool Us with my parents, if you haven’t watched this show, you really should. It’s extremely entertaining, though my girlfriend gets very upset that the show doesn’t tell you exactly how the trick is done. In this episode, a magician by the name of Amazing Allison… Read more: Magic Squares

I read some time ago an article by Terence Tao on how to assign partial credit scores for multiple choice tests – the article can be found here. Terence’s solution focused on True/False questions, but could be easily generalized to multiple choice questions, but involved as part of the solution giving negative marks to students,… Read more: Partial Scoring for Multiple Choice Tests