Participant Testimonials

Jan 09 - Jan 14, 2011

I visited the Games of No Chance workshop in January 2011 and had a wonderful time. I was able to present the work I am in the middle of for the perfect audience. Some of the main researchers in the field showed great interest in my work. In fact, I was told that it had opened up a whole new territory of combinatorial games. If I would not have come to BIRS, I would not have had this great feedback. Also, as a consequence of this workshop I am currently working on two joint papers that would not have come about otherwise. Thank you so much for your wonderful work. I am most grateful! I presented two papers at the conference. One is submitted to TCS in May, the other I plan to submit to the GONC proceedings in August (this is a joint work with Johan Wästlund). The conference has also resulted in two ongoing projects with participants at the workshop, one with Michael Weimerskirch and the other with Aviezri S. Fraenkel. Both these projects are intended for the GONC proceedings. Both these projects resolve a question which was posed at the conference.

Urban Larsson Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers & University of Gothenburg

...Thank you very much to the organizers for this opportunity to come to this BIRS event, which was just great for me: - for opportunities of meeting people from combinatorial game theory (for which I am an extreme beginner...), - for opportunities of discussions with people with solid background around undecidability in partially observable games, - for opportunities of meeting once more my friends of Monte-Carlo methods; - for the opportunity of playing games against a pro human player (including a won game as black against a 9P player, thank you so much Martin for this opportunity! there are still not so many wins against pros as black and this is a great new result due to this BIRS event) - for the beautiful environment in Banff and the scientific paradise at BIRS. This was my first time at BIRS and it's as good as Dagstuhl - two great places for learning and doing research. I'll remember to acknowledge BIRS in my next publications.

Olivier Teytaud Université Paris-Sud

It's too early to say for sure - several new projects have begun at BIRS, and I hope that of those, at least a couple will continue strong...

David Wolfe Software Development Lead
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