Devastated to discover that there is only one Trekkie among my students, and he hasn't even watched Voyager.

#StarTrek #JusticeForTuvix #ProfessorLife #AcademicChatter #StarTrekVOY #StarTrekVoyager

@anna sad!
@bnys Was also devastated to learn that there's only one student who knows the game Hanabi. In a few weeks we will find out how many of them watch Taskmaster (a lot more, based on previous experience).
@anna @bnys Hanabi is great, but few people seem to know it. I have a demo using the Catan board game, and every year I vastly overestimate how many of my students know Catan. Really, how can you have never heard of such an iconic board game??
@SaltFactory okay I’m now rethinking the use of Catan in my lectures 🥲 @bnys
@anna I'm curious to know how you use the board games in your lectures. To do general game playing, or to show example constraint models, or something else?
@SaltFactory mostly to illustrate the assumptions we’re making. The context is a course on algorithms for np-hard problems. We cover heuristic search, constraints & inference, and simulation-based solving. I just finished teaching the first part. Maybe you know dr Demirovic? He’s taking over now and will start teaching the second part tomorrow.
@SaltFactory Anyway: I covered MiniMax with alpha-beta, and MCTS, so I had to talk about things like turns vs simultaneous moves, zero-sum vs general-sum, perfect information, fully observable, deterministic, stochastic etc. In practice we mostly play noughts and crosses 🤷‍♀️
@anna Sounds like a very fun course to teach! A colleague recently introduced me to ultimate tic-tac-toe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tic-tac-toe), and I've been wanting to write a simple minimax algorithm ever since. 🙃
Ultimate tic-tac-toe - Wikipedia

@SaltFactory Go for it! And make it available on github, so next year I can tell my students to check it out 😇
@anna 'If you want to keep attending my lectures and pass this year, I expect you to quote Captain Janeway in every one of the forthcoming ones.'

@ElBeeToots If only this course started 2 weeks earlier, I could've referenced Threshold Day.

Then again: maybe not. Today I was talking about creating children in the context of building search trees, and hadn't clocked anything problematic about that until the entire lecture hall started giggling and a student remarked that they hadn't intended to join a biology class 🤦‍♀️

@ElBeeToots Also: I'm operating on way too little sleep, so this is definitely me today...
@ElBeeToots Also also: somewhere in the universe there are pictures of me playing Captain Janeway in Star Trek themed LARP.
@anna A quip with 'resistance is futile' or 'it's life, class, but not as you know it' might have worked 😏
@anna 😮🥺😭
@rieder I guess a question about Icheb and Kal-Toh was a tad too niche for this audience.
@anna is he even a Trekkie
@xconde I'm not one to gatekeep Trekkiehood 🤷‍♀️
@anna good point! 💚