Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Googleplex

I just accepted the internship offer from Google. I will be headed to the Googleplex this summer. Numenta replied saying that they will not be giving me an offer. I will be doing a 14 week internship at Google. When I finish the internship in August I plan on visiting my parents in Sri Lanka for a few weeks before returning to UBC.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Summer Internship

Today I got internship offers from both Google and Facebook. I am just waiting to hear back from Numenta before I make a decision of which to accept. On Friday I visited Numenta for a full day of interviews. Jeff Hawkins and I were on the same flight to San Francisco. We shared a taxi from UBC to the airport and he even gave me a ride to my hotel after the flight! It was a great opportunity to talk with him about HTM.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Contests and Interviews

There is a new programming contest on Al Zimmermann's webpage: http://www.azspcs.net/Contest/MagicWater. I am currently ranked 8th out of 56. The contest lasts months, so there is no way I will maintain this high rank :D. On the son of darts contest I currently have a score of 90.00 and a rank of 59 out of 384.

Three friends and I are entering the Game Design category of Imagine Cup. Today we submitted a game demo. It is a simple text adventure game using Silverlight. The game also works in Linux using Moonlight. I wrote the text parser for the game. Our team was speculating that we probably put the fewest man-hours into making the game out of all the competitors (so I will be surprised if we advance to future rounds). If we make it to the finals we get a free trip to Poland.

I am currently in the interview process with Google, Facebook, IMO, and Numenta for a summer internship. Later this week I will be flying down to California for a full day interview at Numenta. Coincidentally, Numenta's founder Jeff Hawkins is giving a talk at UBC this week. I have scheduled a meeting with him when he gets here!

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Son of Darts

I spent the entire day working on Son of Darts. I am now in 71st place out of 379. My current submissions use a variety of searches including stochastic local search, backtracking, greedy, and various heuristics. Out of the 19 Canadian competitors I have the highest score :D