The entry for the Independent Game Developers Festival has been completed, Bubble Blow. You can read more about it at http://beauhinks.com/bubbleblow

Very basic game, but given the time constraints turned out relatively well. Physics work reasonably realistically. I was able to add in dynamic collision geometry generated by the textures before submission to the contest… kinda cool!

Second:

The St. Mary’s project using genetic algorithms for autonomous navigation is slow going–mostly in part because of time spent on Bubble Blow. However, I have a working robotics platform running a Pic18f2550 which allows us plenty of control. My partner and I are now working on condensing the code and fitting it on the microprocessor so we don’t have to do any sort of tethered control. We have wireless modules, which I would have to write a bit of code to interface between USB and serial to get to work properly, but the original idea was to have fully autonomous robots capable of seeking goals and avoiding predators.

We’ll get there. Maybe some pictures will go up soon.

Third:

The site has been neglected for a few months. My schedule this semester was a bit more hectic than anticipated due to taking on an aid position for a math class. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stay on top o Beauhinks more in the next month and year as new opportunities present themselves. Physics is good. Programming is good. I should have a bit of research up soon on the (well understood) application of Statistical Mechanics to Information Theory. Is there a fundamental limit on knowledge?

That is all.

~Steven

Anyway, thought this was an interesting graphic, especially considering the hurt of living in the UK for the past 6 months. Click the image for the large version.

Yeesh!

-Steve

Yahoo Pipe are an easy way for non-developers to aggregate data. Using a simple drag and drop interface, users can filter, parse, and sort XML feeds from all over the web into a single feed. Pipes even allow user input into queries. Anyway, I played around with Pipes when they were released but really had no use at the time.

The Organ Pipes

Since I’ve been in Scotland I’ve been streaming music from an FTP server residing in the States containing my music collection. Until recently, I haven’t been listening to many new artists. However, I discovered a music blog aggregating service www.hypem.com roughly two months ago. It works wonderfully for finding both new releases and old favorites by crawling through blog posts all over the web for music. The search feature works well, but I decided it would be a nice way to apply Yahoo Pipes to hypem.com by filtering by artists and song tiles while removing duplicate entries. The design is fairly simple and pulls the first 10 pages of results from hypem.com. Check it out: Search for Songs or Artists

Works reasonably well–eventually would like to write my own application for searching and playing music more efficiently as my own library has grown beyond the bounds of must desktop music databases.

This is a short post since exams are approaching. Need to review Gaussian waves/tensors and Debye approximations in the next week–eek! Anyway, I’ve mostly completed a few fun projects concerning data encoding. These involve compression, error correction, and encryption. All of the projects are implemented in Java and include source code so you can figure out what’s going on. I enjoyed writing the RSA applet, as the mathematics used for encryption are particularly elegant.

Anyway, visit the projects page for further information and the actual applets. I think I need a nap…

After receiving a few responses to the previous question, I decided to continue the trend of riddles. Some of these will be physics or computer science related. Others might be more general. I enjoy them as they’re excellent mental exercises. I recently discovered this question in one of my old calculus texts.

Is it possible given six toothpicks, to create four equilateral triangles?

Please post any answers in the comments section! This one I think has a few simple solutions–looking forward to seeing the various ways of solving the problem. One I can think of is particularly “elegant.”

What’s New?

Coming up on the termination of my time here in Scotland. St. Andrews just received a classification in the UK as one of the top four Universities. Professors seem excited about that. It has been a great experience, regardless of what happens with grades I suppose!

Exams are approaching rapidly. Not looking forward to them in the least bit. Especially Solid State Physics–I have a lot of Quantum Mechanics to review and teach myself since technically I haven’t had a full formal class on the subject. Also have a few programming projects crunching into my time. Time to implement the GTD methodology! N.B. I’ll be doing a joint year long thesis upon my return to the states. We hope for it to be a successful convergence of biochemistry, physics, and computer science!

Linkage: Grow your brain.

Take it easy,

Steve.

This is incredible, a basic Mario Brothers clone written entirely in Javascript. The entire application is compressed into 14kb. Simply amazing!
Check it out!