Departmental Seminar:
Optimization of a Billiard Player
- Tactical Play

Speaker: Professor Jean-Pierre Dussault
University of Sherbrooke

Date: Thurs. Oct. 19th, 1:30-2:30, WLH 302

Abstract:
We present a methodology to address the technical and tactical aspects of pool using optimization formulations. In this way, a greedy player (with no look ahead) is developed; he (it?) sinks almost any ball, and achieves almost any reposition. We will take this motivation to present an introduction to differentiable optimization techniques. Differentiable optimization requires derivatives... and we will introduce a technique to obtain automatically the computation of derivatives, aptly named "automatic differentiation".

Biography:
Jean-Pierre Dussault is a professor in the Departement d'Informatique, at the University of Sherbrooke since 1982. He received a Ph.D. in operations research in 1983, from the University of Montreal. His main research interests concern the design and convergence analysis of optimization algorithms. He is also interested by various applications of optimization techniques, among which the optimization of a billiard player, and image synthesis and reconstruction.