And of course, my Amazons work continues. It can now compute the score of a game, once certain conditions are met. It can’t handle anything fancy, but for a good majority of endgames it should have no trouble. It can’t handle defective rooms, and it doesn’t fare will with multiple queens in a room (yet). However, it is smart enough to just say it doesn’t know what the score is in these situations. So far, it seems correct when it does come up with a score. More testing should confirm that… I’m not sure what to work on next. I have a million things to add, but I’m not decided on the order in which to do them. I just hope that once the program is half-decent I can get enough people using it so that I can find people to play games against!
I’ve been listening to a lot of Strapping Young Lad lately (And other Devin Townsend stuff. It is certainly an aquired taste. There’s metal, and there’s death metal, and then there is Strapping Young Lad (SYL). SYL is the closest you can get to the feeling of being violently raped by music; a wall of noise that will rip the nuts right out of your sac and jump all over them. Their new album has gone really old-school, which is a little strange. I don’t like it as much as the last album, City, but perhaps it will grow on me. The drumming by Gene Holgan is impressively inhuman. What can I say? I like listening to ‘difficult’ music. Stuff that most people wouldn’t even try to appreciate. That is not to say that I like shitty music — just difficult music that is still really good.
Here is something I wrote in an email to a friend in January. It was a particularly cold day, and I was a little more expressive than is normal:
On cold winder days (-30), it’s quite painful to walk to work. Exposed flesh gets very cold, to the point of sharp pain, which feels like an icy burning (the early stages of frostbite). Moisture in the eyes causes your eyelashes to freeze and when you blink your eyelids will freeze shut until you squint long enough to melt the ice. Moisture from your breath constantly billows back onto your face, freezing to the cheeks and nose.
When your body senses that it’s cold, the blood vessels in your skin and extremities contract, redirecting more blood to keep your core temperature stable. As a result the skin freezes easily, and so do the hands and feet. Interestingly, it is possible to focus (meditate) your brain into directing blood back to the skin and hands, at the risk of dropping your core temperature & getting hypothermia. It’s a trade off between the two, depending on how long you’ll be outdoors in the chill. And the strange thing about all of this — I just love it! There’s something fun about living in an environment that can kill you….
My amazons program is coming along nicely. In amazons, the game is over when a player runs out of moves. However, long before the game officially ends, there is usualy a point where the queens are all closed off from each other in separate rooms. At this point, each player simply uses up their moves in their rooms, uncontested. Typically, at the point that all rooms become closed off, you can just count the empty cells in each of the rooms to see who has the most moves left. For instance, black might have 21 moves left and white, 17, in which case black wins by a score of 4.
I want my program to detect the win and score as soon as the rooms have been closed off. The catch? It’s not always as simple as counting all of the empty cells in a room. Some times rooms are defective — which means that they cannot be entirely filled. There may be a section that forces the player to choose one half of the room, at the expense of the other. For instance, moving into the other section and firing an arrow may block access into the rest of the room. Solving rooms in general can be a difficult problem. If one uses a brute force search, it is trivial to solve small rooms. But as the rooms grows in size, the time needed to search grows exponentially. For instance, a room with 12 cells may only take a second to search, and a room with 13 cells might take hours!
For a human, solving the rooms is quite trivial, most of the time.
I want to add some of these smarts to an automatic solver. My plan is to figure out some easy ways to solve the trivial parts of a room, and identify defective areas, which can be analyzed separately. If that turns out to be too difficult, I’ll simply have the program automate what it can, and if it gets stuck, the human players will simply have to play it out themselves. For those who are getting curious, here is a good amazons site.
So last week Christine & I went to San Francisco for a short 5-day vacation. We went from -20 degrees (Celcius) to +15 and up, in the bay. We had a great time, wandered all about the crazy city. A hilight was stumbling upon thousands of people protesting the impending war on Iraq. We, of course, joined in the march for ashort while. There were so many people, it sounded like a football stadium, right in downtown S.F. The electricity in the air was stupdenous. Anyhow, here are two of my favorite pictures from the trip. The first is Christine on the back of a cable car with a nice shot down to the bay. The second is me looking goofy on a one-hour cruise around the bay.
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Here’s something relatively new to my web site. A long time ago I wrote a program in java that explores the mandelbrot set. This summer I fooled around with apple’s quicktime classes for java. I then generated a super-duper quicktime movie of a fly-through, deep into the set. The original movie file was about 100 megabytes, so the one I have posted to the web is only 7mb (and unfortunately, of fairly low quality). Enjoy!
What am I doing lately? Well for starters, working on crazy 3D vector math and protein folding algorithms. That is for work of course, at BioTools Inc..
At home, I’ve been coding a GUI for playing the abstract board game known as Amazons. This is an incredibly beautiful board game that feels a little like a cross between chess and go. It’s new — only about 20 or so years old, and very few people play it so far. The rules are very simple, but the game-play is not. An excellent combination. Anyhoo, I’m making a polished looking java app that will allow online play. It’ll be pretty sweet when it is done. Hopefuly we’ll get a nice little amazons community playing with it.
The last big thing is Civilization III. My coworkers & I are playing a play-by-email game of Civ-III, which will take approximately forever to finish. We’re averaging about 1 turn a day….uhg. For being the least experienced player of the 6 of us, I think I’m doing very good so far.
Since blogging is trendy now, I’m jumping on the bandwagon. I suck at writing, and I’ve been wanting to keep a daily log on my crap for years, just to keep myself organized — a medatative sort of excersise, so voila. My blog. No one will read it but me, and for good reason. It will be boring and self centered. Okay, other blogs are like that too. Mine will have bad writing though. Peace out.
