Mario Giambiagi: (1928-2002)

Learning to Play Mario

Computer Games are interesting test beds for research in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Games usually have continuous state spaces, large action spaces and are characterized by complex relationships between components. Without applying abstraction and generalizations, learning in computer games domain becomes infeasible. Through this work, we investigate some designs that facilit...

Mario Kart Is Hard

Nintendo’s Mario Kart is perhaps the most popular racing video game franchise. Players race alone or against opponents to finish in the fastest time possible. Players can also use items to attack and defend from other racers. We prove two hardness results for generalized Mario Kart: deciding whether a driver can finish a course alone in some given time is NP-hard, and deciding whether a player ...

Arcetri, 1928 -1932

Early in 1928, a short time after receiving my doctorate at the University of Bologna, I was offered a position of assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Florence. The Institute rose among olive trees, on the hill of Arcetri, a short distance from the villa where Galileo had spent the last years of his life as a political exile. The chair of physics was held by Professor Antoni...

Aloysio Janner (1928-2016).

Aloysio Janner passed away on 27 January 2016. He was born in 1928 in Muralto, Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. He was awarded his master’s degree with a thesis under Pauli at the ETH Zurich, but during his PhD work Pauli died, so Aloysio finished his PhD with Thellung, at the University of Zurich. Then he went to the Batelle Research Institute in Geneva, where he worked with E...

Meeting - 12th December 1928