The Animals...They LIVE!

My precious animals can finally move! They don't move on top of each other (like Larry's simulator) and they move independently of each other as well. I had trouble keeping track of the animals before and to have it working is wonderful. After consulting Larry, I was even able to put in a time delay between each refresh of the map so I could actually see what was happening. Without the delay, the landscape changed so quickly that I could not discern what was going on. Now, all I have left to do is to define more characteristics of the animals and possibly make my display look not-so-ugly.

We spent some class time in the morning going over the research topics that we were assigned. I noticed that most of the programs were simulations of real world occurences, which is similar to my program. Of course, those algorithms are orders of magnitude (my new favorite phrase) more complex than my program will ever be.

The abacus and the slide rule came back in the afternoon. By now I was a lot more familiar with the slide rule and so I easily figured out how to do division. The abacus was intuitive as well. Joe revisited his discussion on Wednesday about analog versus digital computers because he felt that we had not grasped the true difference yet. After doing a mini-lab, we all came out feeling confident that the brain was an analog, parallel processing machine.

Tdoay was a good day. Project is going well, interesting discussions.

BattleBots

This morning was like any morning. My hair was messy, the cafeteria had screwed up the eggs again, and I was in a zombie like state before taking a shower. A normal morning. I went to our cluster meeting, and then...then!

And then there was light!

A field trip! Finally! Not only was it an actual field trip, it was battle bots. How much cooler can it get? Building robots just to destroy other robots is, in my opinion, much better than a trip to the beach any day. Right now I am waiting for lunch to begin, and then the battle.

Yesterday Joe taught us the difference between analog and digital computers. Analogs function through comparisons while digitals function through computation of numbers. I was surprised to learn that our brain is an analog computer. Right now, our computers are far from the brain; they are digital and use sequential processing whereas the brain is an analog computer that uses parallel processing.

Weekend

We went to SeaWorld on Saturday and then to the beach on Sunday. SeaWorld was great, especially because I was traveling around with John, who had a wheelchair due to his sprained ankle. You know what that means - no lines! We ended the day by watching the special Shamu show (The House of Douse!) and afterwards we enjoyed the dual firework shows. The beach was fun as well. I played football, built sand fortresses, and fought the waves.

Today in class, we listened to Larry as he demonstrated the importance of designing efficient algorithms. He showed us that even basic operations such as multiplication can be rewritten to shorten the calculation time of large problems. Right now I am in the computer lab running his traffic simulator, which is of particular interest to me because my final project is to build a similar simulator. He also offered me a few suggestions for our simulator, such as giving predators a sense of smell and customizing different speeds for running.

Final Projects

I got grouped with Yongwha. (Aliases include YoungGunna, STURZ, Yong'un, Yong, and "you there!") We plan to work on the freeway project with a few modifications to make it take place in the jungle. My idea is to determine which characteristics of animals is best suited to suriving in certain environments and to observe the interaction between different species. The animals will have qualities that can be changed or designed by a user; the animals will then be placed inside an "arena" of sorts to duke it out for survival. If anything, the project will be a social simulator. There is still the possibility that we can take the animal idea and extend it to simulating human social interaction as well.

The project will be one of the more programming oriented assignment. However, there will not be any problems firguring out how to implement it. The solution to completing the project is fairly straight forward and is of the sort of work I have done before in class. Everything should work out just fine. At least I hope so. Since it has been determined that I am going to do most of the programming, I guess I will make YoungGunna do most of the poster if we have one.

Serious Gaming

I was a bit disappointed at the lecture about games today. First, I was not impressed by the speaker showing up late and then bumbling around looking unprepared. We were all a bit bored during that time and were waiting on him to finish up. When the lecture started, interest began to pick up because the speaker discussed the evolution of games, hardware, and software. He even showed clips of games that his students had designed in the past. However, once the talk progressed past that, he began to delve into technical elements such as pathfinding, algorithms, and more. I felt that there was a disconnect with the overall intent of the lecture. Too much time was spent teaching about physics and other things. Though I personally was disinterested in the lecture by the end, I still think it was an overall good lecture.

Robots + AI = the Awesome

Yesterday:

The second half of class was spent on sorting algorithms, from QuickSort to BubbleSort (which was a nightmare). We acted out the processes again, which was reminiscent of the first day.

Today:

Discovery Lecture was pretty cool and it was obviously directed towards our cluster, the Science of Computing. It was appealing because it covered both robots and artificial intelligence. With such a combination, who could resist? I paid attention throughout the whole lecture except for the sections about neural wiring, which was a bit too technical and tedious. Overall it was a good lecture - the clips of learning robots was amazing, which the audience noted. The robots seemed so much like human children that it was hard not to appreciate what was going on. Jeff, the speaker, was focused and playful at the same time. Both these qualities led to an excellent presentation. (His powerpoint was also a lot more decorated and planned out than the other discovery lectures.)

Class time was spent going over more scientific method material and we performed a simple experiment as well. No biggie and a bit uninteresting.

Google and Sorts

Google returned as a subject in the classroom. Larry researched more into it and find out, more accurately, how it worked and the computational power required. Class was spent going over the math and numbers, and ended with a demonstration on how certain sorting algorithms worked. It felt like the first day again, acting out a simple loop. It was more interesting than the first time, however, because we were more involved.