Mindstab.net

So, what have I got on the go?

• School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they’ll be delicious and meaty
  • CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
  • CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
  • …actually, I’m also taking spanish!
• “Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp” by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I’m really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I’ll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I’ll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
• BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
• Peter Michaux’s Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he’s blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I’m following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
• The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.

So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn’t be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!

Also, if I haven’t mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It’s fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast’s I’ve ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.

But now I’m stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I’m actually quite excited to try out.

Finally, I’m reading “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.

If you’re wondering what’s been eating my time, the simple answer is school. It’s my last year, there are things to be done. I’m helping a lot more, which takes time, for one thing.

The other thing is my CS 416 (distributed computing) term project. It’s kind of neat, Douglas Hofstadter would approve. It’s a P2P website: a website with a java applet that is a webserver, that can server the whole web site to other browsers, and it also servers it self to itself, and by using AJAX, the website can talk to “itself”, or more specifically, the server, which can also talk via AJAX to other servers. So not only does the website server itself and talk to itself, it forms a network of all the websites. I’ll probably put it online when it’s a bit more finished.

So yeah. I’m doing ok with keeping on top of my classes, but it pretty much takes all my free time that went to coding this summer. I’ll be back eventually ;)

I’ve been quiet on the blogging front lately. Don’t know exactly why, could be school has kept me busy, or who knows.

Anyways, I thought I’d pop in and mention something I should have back in January when it started, which is that two friends and I entered MIT’s BattleCode competition. It’s an AI competition that a class at MIT was running, but was also open to public participation. Basically you are writing AI to run inside robots on a battle field. You and your opponent start with a few robots and they have to coordinate and do things like build more units, mine, and attack then enemy. The AI executes inside each robot so there is not overall “player” of the game, just lots of instances of your code, hopefully working together. It was a fun neat challenge.

It also reminded me of how much I’m not a fan of Java, and don’t think I didn’t make a list that I might publish if I get unlazy at some future point. Anyways, we worked on it for a while and then the open tournament was run. And we got the results back this week,

Now since the MIT teams had class time and a whole class of people to work with and bounce ideas off of, sadly they still dominated.

But there was a second ranking, this time of Non MIT teams only, and now for the real surprise: we won!

battlecode.mit.edu/2009/info/glory

Our team was called “Bad Meme” and we were representing UBC and you can see it all their on the results page. Of all the other non MIT teams, we were the best. It’s really kind of surprising and awesome. Especially when you consider that anyone anywhere could enter and it appears that there were teams from places like Stanford and Harvard, and that we beat them. So that’s kind of a buzz.

And so that a big chunk of what I’ve been doing in the past month: programming battle AI. That and school. But now with the competition over and school coming to a draw it’s time to look for some new projects. I have a few ideas already, hopefully I’ll get around to mentioning them before they are over this time, but time will tell.