Andrew Cooke | Contents | RSS | Twitter | Previous

Critterding, Polyworld (Evolutionary AI Sims)

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 17:32:02 -0300

Polyworld seems to be the original - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld

"Polyworld is a cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X) program written by
Larry Yaeger to evolve Artificial Intelligence through natural
selection and evolutionary algorithms."

There's also Critterding - http://freshmeat.net/projects/critterding -
which has been modified to produce Telepathic Critterbug -
http://arbornet.org/~flamoot/telepathic-critterdrug.html - that I
think is supposed to be art, but I don't get it yet (there seems to be
an added shared blackboard).

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108094

Andrew

Permalink | Comment on this post

Previous Entries

For comments, see relevant pages (permalinks).

Visiting Bariloche (Balcones al Nahuel)

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 11:27:28 -0300

We just spent nearly a week in Bariloche - I thought I'd make some
notes here that might turn up in searches for people in a similar
situation.

Bariloche itself was better than I expected - I was thinking it would
be absolutely packed with tourists, but actually it's quite a nice,
small Argentinian town.  There's certainly a lot of visitors, but it
still retains much of the character of a normal town (just with many
more restaurants and "mountaineering clothes" shops!).

We stayed in this flat / apartment -
http://www.balconesalnahuel.com.ar/ - and it was pretty much exactly
what we needed.  It was close to the town centre (5 min walk), on the
same block as a decent restaurant, and the views really are as good as
they show on that website.  In fact we almost didn't book because the
website photos were so "photoshopped" that we didn't trust them (one,
which has since been changed, had a view through a window that, if you
thought a little about the angle, should have looked at a building,
but instead showed clear blue sky).  In fact, if you remove the gloss
of the photos, and add a little wear and tear (one wall, for example,
had a patch of flaking paint, apparently from an old leak), they are
pretty accurate.

The owners were very friendly - they even met my parents when they
arrived in town (the night before Paulina and I) and showed them to
the building, etc.  The only negatives I can think of are that (1)
there was very little in the way of basic supplies (no salt, or spare
toilet paper, for example - all things that you can buy easily from
one of the nearby supermarkets) and (2) the telephone only made local
landline calls (the owners have cellphones, so you cannot call them
from their own apartment...).

I gather that most people who go to Bariloche stay away from the town
itself, in cabins.  But if you don't have a car, it makes much more
sense to be in the centre.  For us it worked out very well - we could
go for a meal of a coffee, while my parents could catch buses to
various sightseeing areas, etc.

Note that Bariloche was significantly colder than the equivalent
latitude in Chile (perhaps because of the altitude).  We were there in
early February and I regretted not having a warm jacket (was wearing
two t-shirts, a shirt, a jumper and a soft shell, with scarf and
hat!).

Now some less positive comments about the crossing from Puerto Montt
to Bariloche.  Various firms offer this trip, but as far as I can make
out, there's a monopoly that runs the actual buses/boats.  The idea is
that you use, over a day, a series of boats and connecting buses to
travel from Chile to Argentina (or back again).  In good weather, the
views would be pretty spectacular.  However, there are also many
drawbacks - not the least of which is that we did the trip twice, and
it was cloudy both times.  Also, you are dumped for lunch in a small
town that appears to be owned by the company, and which has three
non-competing restaurants (self-service, normal restaurant, and
gourmet).  As a consequence, prices are double what you would pay in
Chile (and even more expensive compared to Argentina) and, unless you
do one of the "activities" (which cost more money), you have 3 or 4
hours to kill - not much fun in the rain (they kick you out of the
self service restaurant once everyone has finished eating....).

If you've got lots of money, or good luck with the weather, it *might*
be worth doing once.

Andrew

Permalink

UYKFD Description

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 09:13:16 -0300

I just posted this at reddit -
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aydxd/reddit_how_do_you_cycle_through_your_music/
- and thought I might as well copy it here (UYKFD, the program I am
referring to is here - http://code.google.com/p/uykfd/ )


i wrote a program that generates playlists from related artists and
configured it so that the list slowly "drifts" over time. i use that
to generate lists of music that i then upload to my mp3 player.

for example the list i've been listening to recently was generated by
starting with a certain ratio (my music collection covers a lot of
years). it starts with the cure, joy division, echo + the bunnymen.
that drifts to siouxsie, the lsits, bikini kill. then sonic youth,
animal collective, xiu xiu, the national, the strokes, beta band,
dinosaur jr. later the foals, linertines, jamie t. a bit later still
it moves to some portuguese stuff (barao vermelho, os mutantes,
gilverto gil). then, via tom ze, to more experimental stuff (ground
zero, praxis) before returning to more listenable jazz (gianluca
petrella, astro can caravan, miles davis), back to slightly more odd
stuff (art zoyd, fred frith) then zappa, the mars volta, jane's
addicition, alan parsons project, genesis (oldies but goodies!),
police, supertramp. mellowing out with grateful dead, jimi hendrix.
after that it seems to decide to follow male vocalists - john cale,
jeff buckely, nick cave, elvis costell, david byrne....

i listed all that to show how it manages to cover a nice range of
music without sounding like it's on random play - the tracks that
follow each other usually sound pretty related (not always, because
the software only "knows" about artists, not individual tracks - given
an artist, tracks are selected at random).

it works out who is related to who using last fm tags. because these
can be almost anything it sometimes finds quite unusual connections.

although i am really happy with this, and the software is available
for download, i am not providing a link because it is (1) very very
rough around the edges; (2) extremely slow (takes a day on my quad
core to generate the graphs necessary); (3) a bit nasty to get running
(written in scala, uses mysql as a db) and (4) i don't want to put
effort into supporting it. but if anyone is intersted and smart enough
to get it working themselves, feel free to google it out and give it a
go.

ps i generate a pile of lists on hard disk and then have a script that
copies a couple of lists to the mp3 player (along with the playlists).
i can get 2 or 3 playlsists (200 tracks each) on my 8Gb player (fairly
high bitrate mp3s) and that's several hundred different albums (but
only a few tracks from each). the main drawback with listening to the
mp3 player is that if you like something you can't go listen to other
music by the same person. but if i'm at home playing form hard disk
(with squeeze server) that's not a problem of course.

Permalink

Formal AI (Solve all Problems)

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:09:07 -0300

The Fastest and Shortest Algorithm for All Well-Defined Problems - An
algorithm M is described that solves any well-defined problem p as
quickly as the fastest algorithm computing a solution to p, save for a
factor of 5 and low-order additive terms -
http://www.hutter1.net/ai/pfastprg.htm

Background -
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/build-optimal-scientist-then-retire

Andrew

Permalink

Google Social Search

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:16:41 -0300

Am I the only person to find this creepy?  The advice they give, if
you don't want it, is to log out of your account - but then I lose
gmail.  For now I have changed my default search on my browser to
Bing.  But I'm thinking maybe I need to change to a different webmail
provider.

Anyway, if you don't know what I'm talking about, see here -
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228

Andrew

Permalink

Books On Suburbia

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:30:52 -0300

An interesting reading list -
http://ask.metafilter.com/144320/Intellectual-treatises-on-suburbia

Andrew

Permalink

Generating Syntax Errors from Examples

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:56:57 -0300

http://research.swtch.com/2010/01/generating-good-syntax-errors.html

This is for LR parsers, but maybe it can be moved over to LEPL?

Andrew

Permalink

Thought Crime - The Heretical Two

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:09:10 -0300

Background - http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/01/03/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/

The site in question - http://www.heretical.com/

BBC report of jailing -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/north_yorkshire/8144366.stm

While I don't agree with their politics, I do believe in free speech.

Andrew

Permalink

Pinera, Chile, Economist

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:32:32 -0300

A good article that I agree with almost completely (it's a pity it
didn't mention corruption, though).

One worrying thing that I hadn't thought of, and which the article
mentions, is Pinera's attitude to Chile's financial reserves.  Chile
has weathered the recent crisis well, and those reserves will help it
with coming issues (we are a long way from safe).

Another, smaller, issue is drifting away from Lula, who seems to be
doing a very good job.

http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15330886

Andrew

Permalink

NNMF - An Alternative to SVD

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:42:10 -0300

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-negative_matrix_factorization

Via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066951
"It has the advantages of keeping a sparse matrix sparse, can be
iteratively created and generally the bellkor team's matrix
factorization of choice."

Andrew

Permalink

Unladen Swallow Is Dead Duck?

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:01:24 -0300

Looking at the numbers here - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/
- are disappointing.  Speedups of around 10% at a cost of 5x
memory....

The poor state of LLVM's JIT is given as the reason.

Andrew

Permalink

Norvig on Non-Parametric Analysis (+ Other AI Videos)

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:50:20 -0300

http://videos.syntience.com/ai-meetups/peternorvig.html

"... how non-parametric models can be applied to vision and language
problems in data-rich environments."

http://videos.syntience.com/

A total of 5 videos; all AI related.  They all look interesting.

Andrew

Permalink

This is my blog. It used to be a mailing list called C[omp]ute. It is still generated by email. You can reply to comments via the appropriate link. Edit the mail address to remove the anti-spam measure. However, given the very low volume of replies, and the high rate of spam, it can be months before I moderate a post. Sorry. © 2006-2009 Andrew Cooke (site) / post authors (content).

I am always interested in offers/projects/new ideas. Eclectic experience in fields like: numerical computing; Java web/enterprise; functional languages; Python client GUI/web/database; etc. Based in Santiago, Chile; telecommute worldwide. CV; email.

Recent Threads

Visiting Bariloche (Balcones al Nahuel)

UYKFD Description

Formal AI (Solve all Problems)

Google Social Search

Books On Suburbia

Generating Syntax Errors from Examples

Thought Crime - The Heretical Two

Pinera, Chile, Economist

NNMF - An Alternative to SVD

Unladen Swallow Is Dead Duck?

Norvig on Non-Parametric Analysis (+ Other AI Videos)

Developing OpenCL Code with an Intel x86 CPU

Redmine Project Management

Logitech MX Anywhere Mouse with Linux (Review)

iRiver E30 MP3 Player (A Review)

Models of Human Sociality

Traditional Telephony is Dead

Persisting Knowledge Across A Changing Workforce

Excellent Doctorow Column

Detailed x86 Profiling

Unladen Swallow to Merge with Python 3?

Recent Replies

Updated instructions

tomcat default servlet patten matching -- thank you!

Video of Pro-Pinera/Pinochet Protesters

Retrospective on the Guantanamo "Suicides"

Enable PCIE Too

Relationship between EM and MP?

M3U to PLA (PLP?) Playlist Format Conversion

More Notes on GPGPU Programming

And He's In This Too (Cynical - So Correct? - State Of World)

Confirmed?

Further Optimisation with OpenCL

Matlab/OpenCL Cross Reference

Calling OpenCL Directly

Pinera's Campaign Graphics Have Improved

Couple More Network Links

More On OpenCL and Matlab Here

Or Simply Don't Use The Libs

Workflows

VisTrails

More Details on Java Extensions

Correct Exponents

Andrew Cooke | Contents | Latest | RSS | Twitter | Previous