Monthly Archives: August 2021


2-on-2 A.I. football players trained with reinforcement learning M.L. playing against each other

This lengthy video shows several hours of 4 artificial intelligence agents playing football. The players were trained with machine learning. This means that they were never instructed on how to play football or what their purpose was. After several tries, they found out that getting the ball into the opponents’ goal rewards them, while if the opponent achieves the opposite effect, they receive a penalty.

This video was produced using the Unity game engine.


IEEEXtreme 15.0 Call for Judges / Problem Authors

Are you fascinated by programming? We, the IEEEXtreme 15.0 Executive Committee, are opening the registrations for a select few judges and problem authors.

IEEEXtreme is a global challenge in which teams of IEEE student members compete in a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems authored by industry professionals and coding experts like yourself. Over the 15 years since it began, the competition has attracted over 70,000 competitors from over 2,500 schools in 90 countries around the world.

This is an opportunity where you can not only develop the coding challenges but also you can evaluate them while having the opportunity to associate with some of the top experts in the field. The judging staff of IEEEXtreme are all volunteers who strive to make the contest a fun and exciting experience for all.

Judges responsibilities may include one or more of the following:

Develop at least 1 original and innovative problem. You may see examples of the format of the IEEEXtreme problems here: https://csacademy.com/ieeextreme-practice/
Review and evaluate the problems proposed by another judge and provide feedback;
Provide independent solutions to other proposed problems using any of the competition programming languages;
Be online during the day of the competition for 1-2 hours based on their availability in order to address the contestants’ questions related to the authored challenge.

While not everyone who submits a nomination will be selected, we will carefully review all nominations and thank you in advance for your time to express your interest! We look forward to welcoming you aboard to the IEEEXtreme community!

Please apply using this form on or before 2021/09/19.

More delineations can be acquired from: [email protected]


How to retrieve the SSL cert expiration date from a PEM encoded certificate?

We use the following command to get the ending date of PEM encoded certificates that are generated using certbot and Let's Encrypt:

openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in fullchain.pem;

To get a list of all certificates and their expiration dates, we issue the following find command that executes the above snippet on each result while printing the name of the file first.

find ~/certificates/ -name "fullchain.pem" -print -exec openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in '{}' \;

In this example, the certificates are in our home folder under the name ‘certificates’. The results will look like the following sample:

/home/tux/certificates/example.com/fullchain.pem
notAfter=Aug 22 10:12:55 2021 GMT
/home/tux/certificates/site2.example.com/fullchain.pem
notAfter=Nov 22 03:22:44 2021 GMT

The Fugle Company – The optimal solution

Below you will find our take on the targeted attack game that was developed by Trend Micro.
With some luck and some good decisions, it seems that we got an optimal solution for this game that balances available resources while minimizing exposure risk. We will try and explain a bit our choices which happened to be the correct ones in this very interesting scenario.

Below is a video demonstrating the gameplay we describe above.