The Siroker Brothers

Graduation

The tagline of our blog (“a blog by identical twins separated by rival universities”) may soon have to change. Why? We’ve been reunited. Last weekend my brother graduated from Berkeley and last June I graduated from Stanford.

The chairman of the Computer Science department, William J. Dally, handing me my diploma.

Hard to believe some people pay $160,000 over four years for this piece of paper.

My family.

My brother.

My friends (or Team Awesome as Dae-Ho captioned on Facebook). Left to right: Dae-Ho Chung, me, Greg Cuellar, my brother.

My drawmates and friends before Wacky Walk. Left to right: Brian Sze, Grant Lee, Jacob Tokars (in cardboard), Vikram Fielding-Singh, Brian Lichtenstein, and yours truly.

Eric receiving a student award from Dan Garcia during graduation.

Dan Garcia’s speech describing Eric’s accomplishments:

Eric has been a member of my GamesCrafters undergraduate game theory research group for two wonderfully productive years. Our group works on GAMESMAN, a system developed for solving, playing and analyzing two-person, abstract strategy games, like Tic-Tac-Toe, Othello and Chess. Games are added to the system via plug-in modules. Eric started by authoring a module for Pylos, a three-dimensional pyramid game, which served as a gentle introduction to the system for him. He eagerly joined my architect team (comprised of the brightest and most experienced students) and became one of my most prolific members. He fixed the connect 4 module, squashed numerous critical bugs, implemented symmetries and a global position solver, both of which provided a huge efficiency boost over the standard solver we used to determine the games value. He rewrote my software infrastructure twice in two different languages, and almost did it a third time before time ran out. After all that, his most valuable contribution may be the one he presented in our final meeting, in which he outlined a complete clean-room redesign of our architecture. I’m sure there are other wonderful things he’s done that I’ve forgotten to mention.

It's been my sincere pleasure to get to know Eric outside of academics. He is humble almost to a fault, and has a quiet, confident nature. He also has a rocket arm on the football field and is a monster under the basketball boards. Eric is really going places and is going to blow away his future employer. We’re all really going to miss him, I know I sure will.

Movie of above speech: eric_award1.mpg (mpeg, 129 MB)
Alternate movie of above speech (courtesy of Dae-Ho): eric_award2.avi (avi, 31 MB)

Movie of Eric graduating: eric_walk.mpg (mpeg, 27 MB)

Eric and Dan Garcia after graduation

What's next for the Siroker brothers? It's hard to say. Eric is taking a year off to “goof off” according to what he told Dan Garcia right before I took the picture above. As for me, I'm going to start work at Google in August. In the meantime, I'm working on trying to predict the stock market by automatically analyzing financial news articles. Who knows how that'll turn out.

I guess I can't predict exactly what is in store for the two of us, but one thing is for sure: we will always be bachelors… of computer science.