Important stuff: Graham Kendall and Kristian Spoerer have written a paper on writing an AI that plays Lemmings.
Basically, a genetic algorithm for playing the game.
Here.
Category: tech
Slay Radio: Commodore 64 streaming
Serious Procrastination: The PS2 startup screen recreated
It comes from looking too often at the Playstation 2 startup screen: I wondered what the principle was behind the 7 circling dots:
Here’s how it works: The 7 dots simply move around a circle, increasing the distance from each other while the sine and cosine parts of the circle go out of sync (this makes it look like the circle is “turning” in space). Sometimes the dots overlap to give the impression of fewer dots. It’s hard to explain, but I find it extremely cool that they chose to use 7 dots (rather than the more pedestrian 8).
So I recreated it using the new version 6 of wonderful Game Maker (the registered version). Download your own Project file, executable, windowed executable.
Comment spam troubles
Tech stuff: In order to combat comment spam, I’ve added some behind-the-scenes checks in the comment system. If you experience problems posting a comment, please drop me a line.
Moving to a new server
Things may be behaving erratically the next few days.
(This, by the way, is the new server.)
The perpetual fear of losing data
The blog now runs WordPress. To prove that I retain my techie sensibilities, I only wanted blog software in PHP since I understand that much in the way I don’t understand Perl. Trusting your valuable writing (i.e. data) to alien software always feels dangerous … though it’s an attitude that doesn’t always pay off in hours saved.