Go

My friend Marty recently convinced me to start playing Go with him. Go is a board game that comes originally from China, but we get it from Japan (Go is the Japanese name). It is played by two people who take turns placing stones on the intersections of the lines in a grid. The objective is to "capture" territory which is done by surrounding said territory with your stones. The fundamental rule is that a group of stones is considered to be captured when it has no "liberties" where a liberty is a place where another stone can be played such that it will connect to the chain:
Here, the black stones form a chain which has 3 liberties...two up and one on the right. The white stones block what would otherwise be the 3 liberties on the bottom and left.


This is an immensely complex game and I am just beginning to play it, but in it's simplicity it allows the player to focus on the strategy and reflect upon other aspects of life in which similar principles may apply. Last night I finished my algorithms homework at around midnight and started a game with Marty on a 13x13 board. Considering that I've recently tried to reform my sleep schedule to wake up at 9am every morning, this was probably a poor idea -- the game lasted until half-past three. Not only that, but the power went out briefly around 7 in the morning, so my alarm clock didn't fire. I woke up and saw the clock blinking and my first thought was that I'd slept through the beginning of my 11am class. Miraculously I somehow actually woke up just after 9, so I went to breakfast and started some VLSI homework before class.

~KMarsh

0-Round Pull into Case!

The title of this post needs explaining. A lot of explaining. It is thick with jargon and contextual knowledge. I'll explain it backwards, starting with the meaning and then describing how I got there. The statement means that one of my friends will be proctor of Case next year and that I will be living with him or her. Case is one of our dorms, so that's easy. What does "pull" mean?

At Harvey Mudd College, rooms for everyone except the freshmen are decided through a process called "room draw". In the simplest form, everyone is assigned a number and then goes in order picking which room he or she wants to live in next year. Numbers are assigned randomly (I think) among the members of each class; thus, rising seniors get first pick, juniors next, and sophomores last. When you pick a room, the verb we use is "pull". You can also "pull" a roommate or suitemate (which, I believe, is where the term came from -- you get a room and pull a buddy with you). If you choose a double or triple, you must fill the room, so you write down your name and the names of your roommate(s). When you pull a single, the system is kind so it lets you bring a friend to live in the room next to you.

Seniors are slightly different in that there are 3 rounds of Senior room draw. In an effort to make sure that seniors get to live where they want to, Senior draw is divided into first-round, second-round, and third-round. During first-round, all the rising seniors who currently live in a dorm get to pull into that dorm before rising seniors with better numbers who don't live in the dorm. This is called "in-dorm status" and is the center of much maneuvering during junior draw. The second round is for out of dorm seniors, and the third round is for seniors pulling underclassmen. Confused yet? The worst is over.

The title claims that I got pulled into Case, but it claims I got a "0-Round" pull. I said there were only first- second- and third- round pulls, though! Some rooms are preplaced. A number of rooms each year in each dorm are reserved for incoming freshmen or transfer students and some people petition to live in rooms with certain characteristics because of medical needs (a med-pull, commonly used to get a room with a kitchen for people with food restrictions). One or two rooms in each dorm are the proctors' rooms. Each dorm has at least one proctor (Case and Atwood have two each) and he or she is allowed to pull a friend just like everyone else. That friend is placed in what's called the 0-Round since it happens before the seniors' first-round.

We've explained the title now, but what's a proctor? The proctor is Mudd's equivalent to the RA. They keep an eye on the students and make sure that no huge problems surface. They are the people you can talk to when you have problems, be they fights with friends, noisy neighbors, stress from homework or more touchy issues relating to drugs/alcohol/sex or whatever else you might come across in your first years away from home. The difference between the proctors and most RA's is that the proctors are not here to report your actions to the authorities; they are not responsible for getting you in trouble. They're here for when you need them, whether as someone to talk to, someone to support you when confronting said noisy neighbors, or someone to help you notice, if not avoid, the pitfalls in the rocky road of life. Proctors do report directly to the deans, but they're not interested in getting people in trouble. Their job is to keep the school healthy, physically and emotionally, by collectively watching every student on campus to make sure everything is okay and helping us when nothing is okay. That's a tall enough order as it is, and if you add "tattle-tale" to the job description you've created a paradox in which people should feel comfortable going to the proctors for help, but are afraid of getting in trouble if they do. As an example of the sort of thing the proctors do, after last year's shooting at Virginia Tech our deans and proctors holed up together and spent hours compiling a list of all the people on Mudd who showed warning signs of being depressed, unstable, friendless, or otherwise in the slightest danger of becoming dangerous. (For what it's worth, the list was empty).

Two of my closest friends here at Mudd -- actually the two closest outside of my girlfriend -- have been proctors; one of the juniors I lived with when I first arrived at Mudd who really embodied the spirit of the place for me went on to become a proctor the following year and just last week my roommate, with whom I have shared a room since we came to Mudd nearly three years ago, has been made proctor of Case. I'm a bit disappointed that he didn't get Atwood, but Case is workable and he's been walking on clouds ever since, so when I see you next year, come visit me in Case.

~KMarsh

in Which Robots Rule the Post

In this post I was planning to talk about the career fair last Friday at which some fellow students and I pulled a great prank (with permission, of course), but then we decided to do the same thing on a bigger scale later so we're going to keep it hushed until then (read: check back in later for an awesome story). Robbed of its primary focus the post became very contrived and a rather dull discourse on how great the career fair is, ra-ra-ra, go Mudd.

That's boring.

Instead, let's talk about something cool: robots. With lasers. Got your attention yet? It only gets better. I'm taking CS 154, robotics, this semester and I have to say, building robots is just as cool as you hope it'll be. First off, the class is taught by Professor Zach Dodds who is just about the nicest person you could hope to meet. Not a particularly hard teacher and he doesn't give the same intimidating impression of towering knowledge and experience as some of the other professors here, but a really nice guy who really knows his stuff -- many of his stories are about robots he built in his college days that didn't end up working, but don't let that fool you: Dodds is a smart man with boundless energy. Dodds' research interest is in computer vision, which couples tightly with robotics. He's got a working NES in the lab with a Duck Hunt cartridge. The Duck Hunt light gun is strapped to a pair of servo motors that can point it at any spot on the screen and they are connected through software to a camera that watches the screen and controls the gun to play the game. It was built by some of his students several years ago and this year there are two teams using the Wii Remote as part of their projects.

He's also interested in cheap robots. While his robotic idols are Stanley and Boss, the autonomous cars that won the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challange, he likes working with students on projects that cost very little, and still work well. A classic example is using a webcam and laser pointer as a low cost rangefinder -- true laser rangefinders cost thousands of dollars, but by using an off-the-shelf webcam and a cheap laser pointer it is possible to get very accurate range data. Couple that with some servos and you have quite a good ranging system. I told you I'd work lasers into it.

Just last summer three girls, all rising sophomores, did research with Professor Dodds and entered a competition. Their goal was to build a robot that would autonomously seek out and "capture" 6 colored markers. The capture was done by driving up to a marker and reading off the sequence of colors that made up the marker. They threw together an iRobot Create (the Roomba platform) with a Macbook on top of it and some legos holding up little sonars and a camera. I think the whole thing (except the macbook, which one of the students already owned), cost under $200. Almost all of their competition was teams of graduate students and the next cheapest robot was somewhere in the realm of $6,000. Our team of sophomore girls won the competition. And let the bruised egos of the mighty come crashing down.

I mentioned that I was taking the class, but I have yet to mention my project. My team's project is ambitious...possibly too ambitious. We're entering the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge. The goal is to build a robot that can receive a text file containing a list of objects and search for images online of those objects. Once it has a bunch of images it has to autonomously rove around a testing environment which contains many of the objects from the list, taking video or pictures of its surroundings. After touring the environment it has half an hour to sort through its video and select one frame that has each object in it, declare what the object is, and place a bounding box around it. So far we have a laptop on wheels. On the agenda this week is integrating the motors and vision together. For that we need to get the computer talking to the camera and some servo motors, then write software that will make the camera center on a region of a particular color using both the servos mounting the camera and the wheels turning the robot. Since we haven't gotten our short-range IR sensors or sonars working yet we can't really make it autonomous, but we're going to work on making it capture images and process them against a small database.

I'll keep you posted as this gets further along.

~KMarsh

in Which Our Hero Awakens

Welcome, all! I'm Kyle Marsh, now a junior at Harvey Mudd College. This blog is linked to the HMC Admissions office and was conceived as a means to let prospective students, their parents, and a variety of other people not directly involved with the college gain a perspective into the life of her students. That said, this blog is completely my own work which means I get to choose the topics, the wording, the style, and all other aspects of the blog without censorship from the college administration.

I will discuss my life as it relates to my college experience, various people I know through the college, different activities I've done and anything else I feel is relevant. To start off, here's a little bit about me:

I'm a martial artist and love physical activities such as climbing, parkour, and dance. In fact, I decided to concentrate my humanities work in "movement studies". You'll also find that I have terrible punctuation when it comes to quotation marks; this is an artifact of being a computer science major, as I believe quotation marks should enclose exact phrases without containing any residual syntax.

I enjoy a wide range of activities and take the opportunities I get at Mudd to try new things when they present themselves; since I've been here I've built and launched a rocket, sailed a yacht race, flown a small plane, gone "hashing" (it's a running game, since you ask), worn a santa-hat for nearly two months straight, strung hammocks from the rafters of the dining hall, re-shingled a roof and then put solar panels on it, and enjoyed some of the most rockin' guitar hero jams with my roommate of two and a half years.

I have a girlfriend whom I met on the Pre-Orientation backpacking trip when I first came to Mudd and who is studying abroad in Ireland this semester. I currently live in Atwood dorm, the largest dorm on campus and far, far superior to Trang's Sontag dorm. I work two campus jobs currently: tutoring for the Programming Languages class and Staff (system administration) for the computer science department. I have a group of friends who go tree climbing at midnight on Fridays or Saturdays and a nasty habit of climbing the side of my dorm instead of taking the stairs.

Once again, welcome aboard and I hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions or comments, leave them on the comment panels here or send me an e-mail or instant message. My e-mail is firstname_lastname@hmc.edu and my AIM screenname is Shienath.

~KMarsh