US20150013737 A1 Portable Personal Seating Barrier
Inventor: Daly, Lisa Margaret
Filed: 2014-01-31 Published: 2015-01-15

Problem: Public spaces and public transportation can be too crowded and encroach on a person's personal space.

Solution:  A barrier which defines a space for the user and restricts sensory feedback (e.g., visual, touch, and/or auditory feedback) from others.

The application includes an embodiment for the use of "antibacterial, antimicrobial, antifungal" materials separating the user from others. A much needed feature as the application points out regarding public transportation,

"One seated passenger may eat, engage in personal grooming, cough, sneeze, physically rub against, stare, and otherwise provide unwanted stimuli to the person beside whom they are seated. There have even been cases of passengers urinating on bench seats with the urine running onto the seat and person seated next to them and of passengers vomiting and bleeding on passengers seated beside them."

Checkers had Chinook,  Chess had Deep Blue and Jeopardy had Watson. Now Texas Hold'em has CFR+. A group from the University of Alberta in Canada have developed a new algorithm that may put most human players on tilt. 

A recent IEEE Spectrum article, Computers Conquer Texas Hold'em Poker for First Time, introduces CFR+, an updated version of a technique called counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) for playing heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em. Finally, a way to minimize the regret I feel each and everytime I don't fold 7-2 off suit.

From a game theory perspective, heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em is an "imperfect-information game" due to the two hidden cards each player holds. This missing information increases the number of steps required at each decision point and can require as much as 262 terabytes of memory. CFR+, the new hyper efficient version of CFR, eliminates some of the steps and by applying compression reduces the memory requirements to below 20 terabytes.