TrueSkill

Haven't been engaged in blogging much lately.. not sure whether it's just a lack of interest, or work exhaustion, or my newfound addiction to Call of Duty 2 capture the flag on Xbox Live.

I've realized lately that my COD 2 games have become quite a bit more fun. Somehow, I've been getting matched up with much better players that are at or around my skill level.

When you play in ranked COD 2 games on Xbox Live, there's a short blurb in the game about playing in ranked matches improving your "TrueSkill" score. Never having heard of it, I did a quick web search, and found a Microsoft Research project page!

Xbox.com says it best:

Half the fun is the game you play.
The other half is who you play with.

Totally 100% true.

I've come to realize that Microsoft Research (MSR) is in many ways one of Microsoft's greatest secret weapons. Trails of their work are found throughout Microsoft products everywhere - from Xbox to Office.

Recently, I've begun chatting with folks over there about incorporating some of their bleeding edge technology into the product I'm working on -- how many companies have such a resource at their disposal? A huge amount of their work is also published publicly on the web. If you've never browsed the MSR site, I'd definitely recommend checking it out - there are thousands and thousands of projects and papers posted just like the TrueSkill one above!