Author: Patrick Mitchell

Heinz Nixdorf, AI, and Board Games

We started off the first proper day of the trip strong with a trip to Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, a museum of old and new technologies ranging from cuneiform tablets to VR headsets.

  • Heinz Nixdorf from the outside.
  • The entrance to Heinz Nixdorf.
A neat statue in the Heinz Nixdorf lobby.

I feel like a lot of the more historical exhibitions went over my head, but I could at least appreciate them. We got to see some very old machines, but few of them were ugly or clunky looking; quite the opposite, really. So it’s only natural that I would forget to take pictures of the pretty ones and only have the mind to take a picture of this really old apple brick and some vintage computer mice.

  • The Lisa I, an old Apple PC.
  • An array of old and odd computer mice.

There were also some very unsettling robots, prime examples of the Uncanny Valley.

A robot I don’t remember the name of. Its eyes seem to follow you.
This robot is frightening and I don’t like looking at it, so I naturally took a video. Feel my pain.

Afterwords, Jörg talked to us about AI, its role in games, and the potential role of games in AI. Since the event afterward was canceled due to rain, I stayed in GamesLab, and almost purely by accident played Q, a game by one of our german hosts, for more than three hours. I got all of the collectibles, though, so it was obviously worth it.

One of the gameplay images used on Q’s steam page. Finding said steam page wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it’d be.

Finally, to end the day off, we played some board games and Jackbox games. A good time was had by all, except Stefan, who was dropped into a pit of spikes via trap-door.

The Introductory Day

To help ease us into the swing of things, we had plenty of time to sleep in on Monday. After 11:00am had rolled around, we went out and took a small tour of the city as me made our way to the bus stop.

Paderborner Dom, the local cathedral.

After that, we rode the bus over to the university and toured the campus as well. We—or rather, everyone else—also had lunch there, and after some more time spent in GamesLab that we’d been shown not too long ago, I headed back to the hotel to chill out some more.

One part of the University of Paderborn. It’s quite green.

There’s not that much to talk about, but that’s to be expected for an introductory day. It’s for the best we don’t leap right into the fire right away.

Patrick’s Grand Odyssey to Paderborn

For my very first flight alone, and my first international flight (as far as I remember), things went amazingly smoothly. The plane me and Sam were on was not uncomfortable, aside from the usual, unavoidable trappings of airplanes. I even managed to get an hour or two of sleep, and the plane had USB ports under the armrests, allowing me to charge my phone for the trip. Little did I know I would sorely need every single percentage point upon getting off the plane.

The view out of the plane window while landing in Germany.

I expected the plane ride to be the difficult part, if anything. I figured the train ride would go smoothly, save for maybe a little confusion as to where my train would be. There was plenty of that, but the train, when I found it, was three hours late. Thankfully, I had a flexible ticket, meaning I could take any other train on the same route with that ticket. All of those, however, were also incredibly late, and those that weren’t came in on the wrong side. The only way to get from one side to the other was to go up a floor and walk over up there, and the trains that showed up on the wrong side didn’t wait for passengers as long as the others. Fun times. When I finally got on a train, late for my connecting ride for which I originally had two hours of leeway, I got off at the wrong stop, because I wanted to stop at the main station of Frankfurt, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof / Frankfurt Central Station, not Frankfurt am Main Stadion.

A video surveying Frankfurt am Main Stadion—not to be confused with Frankfurt’s main station, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.

I finally managed to find a train with Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as a midway stop. When I got there, I had to buy a new ticket to Paderborn, which also ended up having a connecting trip. The first trip was very comfortable, but like every single other train I had seen that day, it was late, and so I missed the connecting train. Finally, I found a way to get to Paderborn from there with, wouldn’t you know it, a connection. This connection, however, I made, and after fumbling a bit with the bus system at about 1:00AM, I finally got to In Via.

I’m confident the rest of this trip will go far better, and save for a bout of post nasal drip I just recovered from today, it has, so far. But the trip hasn’t even techincally started yet, so we’ll see!