A couple of years back, Trammell Hudson brought me in to Two Sigma to consult on a project they were putting together. To keep their quants sharp, they undertake regular challenges that require them to tackle an emerging technology.

This time, the challenge was generating AI’s to go head-to-head against one another in an air hockey tournament.

My role in all of this was to help the Two Sigma folks organize a mechanical system they could build and tune using their in-house equipment. We landed on a string-driven system (similar to BatCam) that minimized the amount of mechanical precision they had to hit to produce a fast, powerful computer player.