In a little over 4 weeks I’ll be starting an exciting new chapter in my life. I’ll be moving to Singapore, staying in an area called Sengkang, to be with my girlfriend Brin. And strangely, I’m not feeling nervous about it. Perhaps I will nearer the time. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it; pretty much since I met Brin back in January (generally a good idea if you’re getting into a long-distance relationship), so I’m mainly just excited that the day is finally (almost) here! ...

About a month ago I embarked on the project of writing a poker bot. It has all the things I enjoy about programming: it’s open-ended and can always be improved, it can be played against, and AI features heavily. There’s also a wealth of research on the topic: poker-ai.org and The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group are the two sites I use the most. I started by plugging in to Poker Academy, a game featuring strong AI opponents and a decent user interface. It allows you to hook in your own bots using their own Java-based API, called Meerkat. This was and still is a great tool to test with, but it has its drawbacks. You can only run one instance at once, it’s quite slow, and it has no networking capability. I wanted something I could use to demo the bot online. ...