Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2007

apg — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:09:00 GMT

At the beginning of this month (October) I attended and presented at the CUFP event in Freiburg, Germany. The talk was on some of the work our group has been doing over the last year using F# including the XBox 360 title Halo 3 and on predicting ad clicks for Windows Live. The slides (thanks Ralf) are now available online and for those who couldn't make it videos of all the talks are expected soon. There were plenty of interesting talks throughout the day, including Chris Waterson of Liveops "... using continuation passing monads to encapsulate computation state and hide the complexity of the non-blocking I/O layer" with OCaml, which seemed to be in a similar direction to F# asynchronous workflows. The day ended with a discussion led by Don Syme on the subject of hiring functional programmers; where it emerged that the remaining attendees were actively seeking over 40 new hires. Finally it was time to enjoy the remainder of a hot sunny day and some quality German beer.

Phil

Meeting the Press: Gaming with Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton

apg — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:01:00 GMT

Yesterday, we had some prominent visitors: Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton of PTS-TV. PTS-TV is a UK project to connect with the tens of thousands of Microsoft Partners in a new way (inspired by Channel 9).

Katie and Steve interviewed both Thore and me about our work on TrueSkill for almost an hour - in the end, we even got to play a race of PGR 3 and one Slayer match of Halo 2 against each other!* Everything has been captured on video and I hope not all of this action falls victim to the eventual cutting** - Thore really showed off his amazing skill with the Plasma Pistol/Battle Rifle combination (also known as the "Noob combo") and I scored a memorable hit with the Sniper Rifle.

It was a shame that we could not get Xbox Live to work in order to demonstrate TrueSkill "in action" - we had just returned from Redmond on Saturday and completely forgot to reset the network settings of our Xbox 360 (and being filmed while trying to reset the network connections does not really help to remember).

Nevertheless, we had a really great and enjoyable time with both of them - and by the look of it, they enjoyed the time as well.

Ralf Herbrich

*The race was in Tokyo, 1 lap which I won by comfortable 11 seconds. The shoot-out was 8 minutes or first to 15 kills on Lockout - Thore won this one with a comfortable lead.

**I do hope that Steve cuts out "why" we like to play competitively on Xbox Live - if not, I am in trouble ...

The Applied Games Group Blog : Xbox Live

Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2007

Meeting the Press: Gaming with Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton