davidcook

So, Brickvention was last weekend. In short - it was awesome !

Brief history (of the ones I've attended - I missed out on the first few [1]) - in 2009, it was held in meeting rooms on level 12 of the Victoria University of Technology building. I can't remember exactly, but I think the public expo had around 2-3,000 people come through.

In 2010, still at VUT, we had around 4-5,000 people come through, with queues stretching some way around the block (since the traffic flow was limited by the speed and capacity of the lifts). This brought us to the attention of the Melbourne City Council, and after much hard work from the committee, Melbourne Town Hall was arranged as the venue for the next year.

In 2011, the event went well, but word had got around - we managed to get over 7,000 people through, and turned many (hundreds ?) of people away. Many more probably gave up upon seeing the queue stretching completely around the block, with an estimated 2 hours to wait before being able to get in. The hall was packed to its limit all day, and the committee were rather stressed by the end of it.

So, this year. Still in the Town Hall, but with two major changes - tickets were to be sold in advance for specific session times, and there would be two days of public display.
There were some trials along the way (e.g. when the booking site went down for around 24 hours due to a data centre move only a week before the event !), but all 10,000 tickets were sold by Thursday morning last week, much to the relief of the committee I imagine.

The public display days ran much more smoothly than last year - the queue for entry to each session was cleared in around 20 minutes, the hall was never over-full, and the lulls between sessions meant there was time for the committee and volunteers to take breaks when required.
Actually, that was another change this time - bringing in a bunch of volunteers for crowd management and general helping out - which again took some of the burden off the committee, and left them some breathing room to deal with any problems which did arise.

The only real issue was getting a bunch of publicity (radio and TV) after being sold out - in some cases, this wasn't mentioned, leading to people turning up over the weekend thinking it would be possible to buy tickets.

Anyway, the weekend was very good, the displays were amazing as always, and I'm sure everyone is planning their builds for next year even now (I know I am !).
You can see some of the creations here, and some of my photos here (more to come, for some reason iPhoto keeps "stalling" in the middle of the Flickr upload - very annoying).

And on to next year, and another move to a larger venue - this time the Royal Exhibition Building, in Carlton. Hopefully the larger capacity and slightly more suitable space should lead to an even better experience for everyone who goes along. Keep an eye on the Brickventures website for updates on the new venue, ticket sales, and registration to the "convention" day for AFOLs, TFOLs, and JFOLs. Time to get building !

[1] Due to being on the wrong side of the planet :-) [2]

[2] Weird, Brickvention has no Wikipedia entry ...

Every now and then, I play a game or two of Go (mostly against the computer). I haven't been following news from the Go world in recent years, but it seems that computer Go has advanced quite a bit from when I last checked.

Previously, the strongest computer Go programs had reached roughly the level of a 10-kyu to 5-kyu player[1] - well short of even amateur 1-dan level, which is a fair way below the level of professional players.

It looks like computers are catching up now, though - all thanks to programs based around Monte Carlo Tree Search. One program using MCTS is currently ranked around 5-dan on KGS. Recently, a team using the program "Zen" managed to beat a 2-dan (amateur) player in a best-of-5 series, 3 games to 1. More to the point, it looks like the algorithms seem to be highly parallelisable, so simply throwing more computer power at these programs makes them even stronger.

Interesting times in the Go world - probably a few years yet before the Go equivalent of Kasparov-vs-Deep Blue comes along, but I wouldn't want to put too much money on humans staying ahead now.


The other interesting bit of Go news that I saw recently - there's an Australian-born professional Go player. Her name is Joanne Missingham, and she moved to Taiwan when she was 4, and quickly moved up the Go ranks there. She's currently a 5-dan professional, and has done quite well in tournaments and leagues in Taiwan.


[1] There are two levels in Go rankings - "kyu", starting from 30 (for a raw beginner), up to 1, and "dan", starting at 1 and going up to 7 (for amateurs) and 9 (for professionals). To complicate things, the dan levels are not exactly equivalent between amateur and pro - it's generally considered [2] that the highest amateur dan levels are roughly the same level as 1-dan pro.

[2] At least, it was back when I used to follow these things - with the advent of Go servers on the internet, where amateurs and pros play each other regularly, and pro games are often played/relayed live from tournaments, it's possible that the top amateurs are a bit stronger relative to the pros now.