If you are one of those people who leaves the ballpark early, all I can say is shame on you. SHAME!

Today was an excellent example of why I don’t leave the ballpark early. After scoring two early against Andy Pettit, the A’s would eventually fall behind 4-2 going into the bottom of the ninth. When in the ninth, you see Mr. Automatic, Mariano Rivera, and he gets Chavez to ground out, and then Bobby flies out to deep right. If there was ever a time that heading to the exits might seem reasonable, this is it.

But instead, it turned into an example of why you stay till the last out.

Walker gets a single, and then goes to second on fielder’s indifference. After a good AB, Kendell fights off some high pitches and draws a walk. Up comes Marco Scutaro, who had 7 walkoff hits in his career. He quickly goes down 0-2.

And then hits one deep to left field, off the left field foul pole. Walk off home run.

That’s why I stay to the last pitch.

MLB – New York Yankees/Oakland Athletics Recap Sunday April 15, 2007 – Yahoo! Sports

[tags]Oakland Athletics,Yankees Suck,Marco Scutaro[/tags]

Today also happens to be the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson becoming the first African American MLB baseball player. I can’t decide whether we’ve come a long way, or we have a long way to go. Probably both.

Well, I’ve got my first trivial attempts at alpha-beta search working, and my confidence in the general framework that I had constructed was growing, when I discovered that there are some circumstances where milhouse (which mostly just plays itself at the moment) seems to forget which side it is playing, and moves red checkers when it should be moving white ones. I’m kind of baffled as to the cause. I’ll have to think about it some more. In the mean time, I have begun to consider what work I need to interface milhouse to the world at large: this mostly means understanding how to compile it to play with xchecker, and also to be able to read and produce Portable Draughts Notation files. I haven’t done any work on the former, but the latter is described in the following format description document:

PDN 2.0 Specification

[tags]Checkers,Programming[/tags]