Games at Mumbai just ended. In a few hours, I will arrive at the airport and fly home. My first time in India has been wonderful! I loved it! Here are some quick notes about my time here that I think are interesting: The traffic outside the IIT Bombay campus is the wildest I have ever experienced. Learning to look right first when I try to walk across a road is harder than I thought it would be. All of the food was awesome! I discovered so much! Many bathrooms have a bidet spray nozzle instead of toilet paper. I attempted to learn to use bidets without using toilet paper, but failed. I had to rely on stalls that were equipped with rolls of toilet paper. The venue at IIT Bombay, the Victor Menezes Convention Center, was excellent. There is a great indoor room for presentations and a nice shaded outdoor space for eating and collaborating. (We also had access to some classrooms.) I got addicted to chai, both with and without masala. Notes specific to CGT: I talked about what (I think) a ruleset is and this sparked some conversations. Lots of people wanted to talk with me about my research! That was a (dangerous) ego boost, for sure. I was lucky about the topics I put in my second talk; it addressed many of the questions I got in the two days after the first one. I barely changed anything from the slides I had before I arrived! Four days of talks about CGT is not too much for me, even being sleep-deprived for three of them. I learned a TON about the pre-history of CGT from Carlos. Long, sappy note: I was very nervous about this trip, because air travel is tough for me. Mumbai is the furthest east I have ever traveled. I got quite sick a few weeks ago, and then the day before I left I still had to visit the doctor. My flights here got cancelled on the morning they were set to depart. Nevertheless, I still made it here and I am extremely glad I did. I learned so much. Thank you to everyone I met! Thank you to everyone on the organizing committee! I feel like I could have jumped into 5 or more new research projects! (I'm not a research professor, so there's no way I'll be able to do that, sadly.) I have been very lucky in my career. Many times I have not been able to follow through on all the things I wanted to do, and I've had the fortune to continue on anyways. I received a lot of appreciation here, and it means a ton. I hope that it is deserved; I did spend a lot of time preparing my talks. Just like the Games and Graphs Workshop six-and-a-half years ago and the BIRS meeting in 2011 , I really feel like a valuable part of the CGT community. Thank you to everyone. There may not be any chance in our rulesets, but I've still been very lucky.
Games at Mumbai: Not the Talks
Kyle (noreply@blogger.com)

