Tennessee Tech University Department of Computer Science Blog

It was 3 AM when I woke up on August 7, 2012, to catch my 30-hour flight to the United States. It was not a big deal to wake up that early. Rather, I was a little worried about my next 5 years. Alright, let’s be real – I was terrified to leave home for a country with a completely different culture, mentality, and language. But the decision was made and I was flying to Cookeville, TN to pursue my Master’s degree in Computer Science. Cookeville… A little town – in the middle of nowhere – it really soon became my second home.

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I was 14 at the time.  It was a Saturday, and my father had to go into work that day.  He asked me if I would like to go with him.  I didn’t really feel like spending a Saturday in an office, but my father said I could play on one of the computers there.  Needless to say, in the 1970’s, outside of the movies or television, most kids my age had never seen, let alone touch, a computer. I remember him allowing me to sit in this room, in front of a green-tinted screen, while he was going to work in the other room.  There were no icons. No internet browsers. Not even a mouse.  All that was between me and what was initially a blank screen was this big keyboard – not unlike the typewriter that I had learned typing on in school last year. He asked me if I wanted to play “Star Trek”.  Play a game?!  Sure!  We had no electronic games at home – other than a hand-held game called “pong”, which consisted of a mechanical device that bounced a lit-up dot (the ball) off a “wall” and my paddle, which I moved with knobs.  Sort of like an etch-a-sketch (if you know what that is).  No “screen”. No sounds.  Just a single dot behind a semi-clear piece of plastic that when I missed it bouncing off the wall with my paddle, I would lose a point – as opposed to every time I didn’t miss, I would get a point. But, what was in front of me now, was something completely different!

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I have often questioned whether the general public or even university students really know what it is like to be a professor. I think that our profession is viewed as a collection of “egg heads” that work in (if I may use the platitude) an “Ivory Tower”, completely oblivious to the world outside the brick and mortar of our university campuses. The fact is that popular media, movies, and other outlets misrepresent the role of the university professor, often relying on a number of stereotypes that have been propagated for several years. So, then, you may ask, “What is a professor?” I will attempt to shed some light on this question in an effort to give you an opportunity to perhaps gain some level of empathy, if not sympathy, over the plight of the academic by addressing a number of myths.

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I really enjoy playing board games. Not luck based games such as Monopoly or Risk, but games that require a well-executed strategy. My favorite board game is Maharaja. The idea is to move your architect along the cheapest routes to visit cities and to build palaces. The first player to build all seven palaces wins. Finding the cheapest route to a city depends on where you have already placed houses and on where you can build or move houses on your turn. This is a shortest path problem that must
consider all the different house configurations that can be created during the player’s turn, selecting and utilizing the cheapest one. Writing a competent AI for this game appeared a manageable task as it required a Graph data structure with Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm. Maharaja became the first board game that I turned into a computer game, complete with networking for multiple human players. It was not uncommon for me to think that there was a bug in the game when I couldn’t figure out the path that the AI used and spent so little money on. After staring at the board awhile, I could always find the roundabout route that the AI found, which I might never have seen as a player. 
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Hi!  This is my first ever blog post. I have written articles for newsletters, conferences, and journals, but had never written a blog post until today.

It is hard to believe that I have been teaching in the Department of Computer Science since August of 1993! I am beginning my twenty-fourth academic year of full-time teaching.  All my colleagues from that first 1993-1994 school year are no longer working in Bruner Hall, due to retirements or professional moves.  When I first started teaching at TTU, I was only about 4 years older than the seniors; now a lot of the freshmen were born in 1998. The new students take for granted a lot of things that are technological advances to me. They have never known life without the World Wide Web or smartphones.

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