Travel day!
In the morning I exhaustedly gather up everything, check out, and head to the subway. The Czech subway is beautiful, red and white, and when it breaks out into the sun–wow! At one of the subway stops I download Kasuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which someone recommended to me. I read through the whole sample and at the airport buy the book–it’s super engaging!
Navigating the airport is pretty trivial except for the bag check, where I’m informed that again I’m mistaken about my baggage allowance. I refuse the attendant’s offer to check the bag for 35 Euro (!) and carefully check that my backpack can be squeezed into my cabin bag.
That bit of stress over, I easily pass security and hang at some random gate reading Remains of the Day. The writing style is very in-character the whole time (the story is about an English butler who takes his job as seriously as life himself, and, through a turn of circumstance, ends up taking his first ever road trip across England and reflecting on his life).
At the gate, I stuff my backpack into my bag. The flight attendants are very uptight about my bag size and make me check it–it’s a little too big. I had to improvise and repack right there, at the point of entry to the gate–stuffing things into my pockets, reorganizing. I defiantly then stuff my bag into the bag checker. It sticks a little bit, but the Swiss-like flight attendant can’t turn me back without feeling like a serious jerk, and lets me through with a parting jab, something about this being my lucky day. I think of all the times I’ve survived similar circumstances and chuckle a little bit inside. All these people think it’s my lucky day, but I can consistently pull it off. I’m reminded of the “make them think it’s their idea” principle of manipulation and weird myself out a little bit with what I’ve become.
Flight is uneventful; arrival in Skanska airport and the bus to Uppsala also so. The road is beautifully snowy. Martin meets me right as I walk out of the bus and gives me a big hug :)
We take a walk around, grabbing a snack at a Subway. $7 or so for a footlong which we share and a bag of chips :) Get groceries. Finally, we reach Martin’s flat, which is cozy but in disarray since he just moved back in, and I’m able to set my bags down. Phew! Martin sets to cooking and I settle catatonically into a chair. Martin chops pork and cooks it in butter and heavy cream with a bit of garlic and turnips (he’s a low-carb fiend). I have my suspicions but the food turns out terrific after about 2 hours of simmering. Over dinner he explains to me this little ML playground he has set up for himself, as preliminary exploration for his master’s thesis in Uppsala, trying to train a strategy-learning agent to play tic-tac-toe.
Martin heads off to some salsa dancing thing which I’m too dog-tired to join. I’m intrigued by the strategy-learning (stupidly called Q-learning in the literature after a function conventionally named Q that represents the strategy) so I try writing a tic-tac-toe board in Haskell. It takes me a little while to remember how to set up a little project and compile and run things–jeez–so I write myself a little documentation. Then I have to look up how arrays work in Haskell. Definitely a bit of overhead to starting a little project in Haskell. Soon Martin arrives, I take a shower, and we start goofing around. We’re looking over his code for some bug and somehow the conversation switches to chess. We watch a couple chess videos on the unfolding drama going on with the Candidates’ tournament preceding the upcoming World Championship. I’ve been following the games. Then we start playing blitz chess. We crack a couple beers and things really get going. The first couple of games are kind of depressing before we find our groove, but then our tactics brains hit stride. Martin knows I prefer positional games and nursing a material advantage, which is a real handicap for me playing blitz (the short time control favors violent attacking play). So he starts setting me up with really ridiculous openings and forcing me to play for goofy attacks and even sucker punches. I have a lot of success with this. In one game, I sucker punch a guy with a subtle attack on his queen that looks like it’s serving a defensive purpose, and win the queen outright. In another game, I lose my queen, but still whip up a violent attack and win. It’s crazy! Martin keeps taunting the other players by adding more time to their clock, something which I find myself enjoying a lot. At one point, as I’m about to pull out a really improbable checkmate on a guy, I taunt the heck out of the poor guy with these time additions. Something I’m a bit conflicted about. But for the first time in my life, I felt like a real street chess player. Kudos to Martin for teaching me this mindset :) (As an aside, for some reason, I manage to beat Martin in our games with my usual material-advantage nursing strategy. I have an odd bit of extra confidence playing against friends, I think.)
Crash out around 3am.