Jeremy's COSMOS '05 Blog

The Animals...They LIVE!

2005-08-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Deep Stuff About Life

2005-07-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

When I woke up this morning, I did not expect, in any way, to have such a complex discussion about philosophy in class. I figured that this was a computer science class and did not consider such questions as "Are we really that different from machines?" to be part of the subject, even though Joe, Larry, and Christine had hinted at it before.

The morning lecture was with Christine. She reintroduced the Turing Test to us and brought up a thought experiment called the Chinese Room. The Chinese Room is a thought experiment that says that computers will never be able to think because they can only manipulate data. For example, a man who does not understand Chinese is given a huge rule book on how to respond to certain characters. A man who does understsand Chinese will talk to the man who doesn't; it will seem that they both understand Chinese when only one of them does. The point is that machines can seem intelligent but will never be truly intelligent. After explaining the Chinese Room, Christine assigned us all to split up into groups and debate certain points. One group would defend the Chinese Room experiment while others would defend certain objections to the test, such as the Systems Reply, the Robot Reply, and the Others Reply. (Search them up if you want to know what they are, it's too long to explain.) I was assigned to defend the Chinese Room test, and I, through bad luck, was chosen to present our argument. I believed it to be weak and was personally against the Chinese Room test, but I did the best I could. It was an invigorating debate and discussion however, and I feel that I did get a lot from it.

After lunch we came back to have another debate/discussion with Joe, this time about the difference between man and machine. He asked us to pretend that there was an exact copy of a person's brain, straight down to the atoms, and that the brain would experience exactly what the real person would experience. From there, we thought about whether or not the "new" person was the same person as the original. Was there a "soul?" free will? consciousness? We came to no conclusion, but it was the process that was important. Statements were made with the proper justifications, but then were later revealed to have assumptions that could not be made. Anyway, it was interesting, for lack of a better word.

Lectures are beginning to get interesting!

2005-07-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday:

Larry had us calculate the computing power required for certain tasks such as playing a DVD on a laptop. I found it boring because it was so number based - I would have liked to focus more on the concepts rather than become obsessed with calculations. The computer architecture he talked about was too complex for me as well because I had never been familiar with the terms he used. Not much else to say about it.

Christine's lecture about AI was far more interesting, however. I find AI intriguing so I payed extra attention to what she said. Her powerpoint presentation was not too wordy and she provided excellent video. Her talk left me with the feeling that there was so much more to learn about AI, something that I could look forward to as a student. This was all yesterday, however, so I can't remember too much about it. That's why there won't be as much in this entry as today's entry.

Today:

The morning lecture today was about constructing brains in five easy steps. The speaker, Dr. Spitzer, was very enthusiastic about his subject and it clearly showed in how he presented his findings. His energy made me pay more attention to what was going on and I became very interested in what he had to say about the brain and its workings. He blazed through the first four steps in a succint manner but spent half the lecture on the fifth step alone, which I think was too much. It became too technical to be enjoyable and I began to doze off. Some others seemed to appreciate it though, and asked him questions. After the lecture we moved into our normal classroom with Lara leading a "team skills" exercise. We experimented with pendulums and speculated on whether or not different masses would affect the length of time each swing went through. It was a bit elementary but it was not, by any means, boring.

Our afternoon lecture, from which I just came from, was great. Pevzner is a leading researcher on bio-informatics (I probably butchered the name of his field) and came to speak to us COSMOS students about his theory about breakpoints in the human and mouse genomes. The subject appealed to me because Pevzner illustrated the problem by comparing it to a pancake-flipping problem. That I could understand, and by drawing an analogy between the two, the problem did not seem so foreign or strange to me anymore. I believe it was the best lecture yet. Cluster 1 seems to be turning around: based on the first two days I thought it would be boring, but with the AI and DNA lectures, I truly believe that there is much more to computer science that can be explored.

My First Post

2005-07-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

Creation of blog. It was actually created a while ago but the login site was down, so I was unable to change anything else. Credit for this goes to Andrew (sp?).