SMART-CARD public-transport ticketing systems let people hop between buses, subways, trams, surface rail and river boats--even when these are operated by different companies--without having to buy new tickets. This undoubted good, though, has ramifications. One is that anyone with access can, by following individual passengers (or, at least, their cards), study precisely where people are going. Companies use this knowledge to optimise services--again, an undoubted good. But many other things, some disturbing to freedom lovers, might also be done with smart-card data.

Computational pool is a relatively recent entrant into the group of games played by computer agents. It features a unique combination of properties that distinguish it from oth- ers such games, including continuous action and state spaces, uncertainty in execution, a unique turn-taking structure, and of course an adversarial nature. This article discusses some of the work done to date, focusing on the software side of the pool-playing problem. We discuss in some depth CueCard, the program that won the 2008 computational pool tournament. Research questions and ideas spawned by work on this problem are also discussed. We close by announcing the 2011 computational pool tournament, which will take place in conjunction with the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference.