Microsoft Research in Cambridge: Applied Games Group visit

 I had the good fortune of spending Thursday and Friday last week at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.  I had been invited to visit by Ralf Herbrich and Thore Graepel, the leaders of MSRC's newly-formed Applied Games Group. 

Before starting the Applied Games Group, Ralf and Thore were members of the Microsoft Research Machine Learning and Perception group, also based in Cambridge.  They developed TrueSkill, an algorithm used by a number of popular XBox360 games to match up players of similar skill.  If you're playing Project Gotham Racing 3 online using Xbox Live, and find that after only a few races, you're frequently matched up with random opponents that you race to a photo finish, that's TrueSkill at work.  You can find out more about Trueskill's ranking and matchmaking algorithms here.

If you go on to read the detailed description of TrueSkill, my advice is to take some time to understand the graphs of functions v(.) and w(.), which determine how your ranking is adjusted with every win or loss.  Think about the ramifications of both events when you're playing an opponent with a higher or lower TrueSkill rank, and you'll get the gist of it.

In addition to their really cool work, Ralf and Thore arranged for me to meet with a number of innovative people at MSRC.  If it weren't for the fact that I've been preparing for this week's INDC conference, my blog would be overflowing right now with gushing excitement.  My sincerest thanks to Ralf and Thore for all they did.  Stay tuned for more!