In June I had a 7:30am meeting with some of the guys from the Applied Games research group. The crew was visiting from Cambridge, where they’re based, and despite jetlag and the ungodly hour (seriously, guys: 7:30 breakfast meeting? Gleargh.) we had a hilarious time.
So, WTF do they do? Well, according to their website, Our mission is to leverage the methods of approximate probabilistic inference for addressing relevant applications both in recreational games and in abstract decision games played in the real world. This means these guys make their living thinking of everything as a game … and they certainly seem to have way more fun than the average researchers.
They’re working on some cool super-secret stuff with Bungie and figuring out ways to apply their game-brains to typically un-fun stuff like online advertising. They taught me a few German phrases (quotienfrau!) and I taught them what “Brouhaha” means. (Ah yes: a noisy response to stimulus! Of course.)
