psyche

I’d better start revising soon; we’re on half term and I don’t know when my next exam is. I could easily find out but I don’t want to. Instead many other projects have distracted me: I spent some of today playing chess against my brother and sister, which was interesting and almost fun. However, most of the day was spent doing things like trying to revive a half-dead asparagus plant and thinking about tidying my room. I’ll clean up and start working tomorrow, I think. As I recently agreed with Will, Web 2.0 sites are very aesthetically pleasing and good for procrastination (my cited example was flickr).

I’m also pondering actually doing something; I want to make a small, simple mechanism of laughable complexity that will still make me extremely satisfied: it’ll be some arrangement of a push-to-break switch that’ll effect the automatic activation and deactivation of the store cupboard light - I know, such daring! Such wit!

Watched an episode of House today - the one about naphthalene (it does have that extra “h” in there) poisoning. It was good but I doubt anything could dislodge Hustle from my Thursday-TV-brain-drain session.

Time to sleep, lest I wake up at 13:00 tomorrow. That would be bad and, as Cyrus puts it, waking up late makes one “feel like a wasteman for the rest of the day.” He’s right.

Pax

Information and communication are the keys! Information handling is impressively developed, but communication techniques fall short: programming languages and markup formats like HTML are living (well…) proof of this, although more dynamic systems like XML are a step in the right direction. Imagine a web browser that isn’t simply an interpreter (something that shows you a picture of what the web developer had in mind) but is instead a sort of personalised display (not unlike an RSS aggregator) that could digest information and display it to your specifications. Perhaps legacy “art” browsers would remain, allowing the information to be presented as it is now. The “art” browsers would be to the new aggregators as ornately decorated manuscripts are to modern minimalist books in terms of appearance. Perhaps there would be a level of “digestion” that would be user-controlled (i.e. the user could move a slider to tell the browser how much it should re-sequence the data that are presented to it, changing it from its “intended” form to a more useful, categorised form. Maybe in time, “form” would be forgotten, no tags would be required and computers would read websites like we read books - understand them, not simply interpret them (like we would, say, read out a passage in another language which we vaguely know how to pronounce but not understand - I remember wasted days in my youth during which I would phonetically read out passages from the Qur’an to some old teacher, never knowing what I was actually saying).

Linguistic awareness of some kind is highly important. An AI doesn’t need to think very hard; it simply has to use basic algorithms to process data as its predecessors are no doubt doing as I type and furthermore use more complex algorithms to make its other algorithms more efficient, complex and useful. The data must be digested. We must teach the machine. The greatest processing power, in this era of pre-quantum computing, is us. We teach the web and it in turn teaches us. We tag, sort, prune, remove and add information. There are many people involved. A significant chunk of everyone is involved. Soon we will be replaced by programs (at least in terms of information sorting if not even adding) but until we are, we must endeavour to power this interesting sociological experiment that is, in my opinion, one of humankind’s greatest achievements (the other main one in my mind being the internet…).

I was previously asking myself whether I should pursue maths, physics or computer science but now I have a feeling it’ll be all three in copious amounts in the friendly package that is quantum computing.

I don’t know why I feel this compulsion to make computers think. It would be a magnificent system, a being created manually (so to speak) by a large group of other beings.

It would make my fucking day.

In chess, Elliot and I are making good progress with the middle- and endgame but our openings, although now familiar and underpinned by good intention, are still highly random and in need of consolidation. Over the summer I think my routine will comprise proper formal practice the following:

• Chess
• Fencing
• Maths
• Guitar
• Tetris
• Reading (mostly on informatics, quantum mechanics, electronics and programming)

This is a war!

Pax

I’ve set up the PowerBook somewhere upstairs with an HP PSC750 attached - it won’t scan because of lack of drivers/HP being retarded in terms of support. However, it prints. This is good. GCSEs are now around the fucking corner and to be honest, I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing. Music and German/Italian orals are the really annoying ones, but I have little hope in Music. However I am cramming for this Schumann thing. The banana tree is being parasitised by some really annoying caterpillar. Fuck that fucking shitbag!! Anyway, yeah. I can’t believe how much I want Leopard, iWork ‘07 and iLife ‘07. WHERE ARE THEY?

Also, a port of Chessmaster 10th Edition for Mac would be nice. Defcon too. I want Defcon.

This is beginning to get on my nerves.

Pax

At last. I came across some rather strange errors that I failed to anticipate but I debugged their brains out and now, lo, it is finished!

The actual ranking algorithm is still dodgy but meh. It’s okay for now. Hopefully that’s all I ‘ll have to edit in future as the whole interface and architecture is expandable and contains real data (I know! How great!).

UPDATE: Doesn’t work in Firefox, don’t know why, reported it to them… in fact it only works in WebKit-based browsers…

Also, this guy from the MacRumors forum has the right idea:

Originally Posted by Object-X
We learn that a lot of people on this forum are a bunch of whiny little …

Apple is becoming Microsoft, OS X is worse than Vista, I hate the iPhone, Apple’s loosing it, Apple’s lying, Apple doesn’t care about computers, Apple’s trying to do too many things, Apple sucks, Apple doesn’t care about my feelings, ect. You’re all a bunch of drama queens.

Have drink, smoke some weed, whatever, just relax. Patience.

Pax

I drank a shitload of coffee today and now have a motherfucker of a headache. However, the program is almost ready! It should be finished by tomorrow at the latest, but hopefully within the next hour or so. I’m just compensating for aircraft being able to fly in the damage() function and writing the final updated setRecs() function. Everything else is awesome. I might go through and clean up (”refactor”) the code afterwards - if it’s not too fucking late, which it might be, fuck the fuck … fuck. Sorry, headache.

I must commend the makers of Taco HTML Edit and TextWrangler. I didn’t think there could ever be a Mac program to rival Notepad, but both of these fucking beat the shit out of it.

Pax

I’ve put in more data (specifically, armour types, rate of fire, damage per burst, bursts per shot and warheads [which basically specify what percentage of the damage they ideally do is removed when encountering different types of armour]) and have written a few new functions. Three in particular will save me a lot of time:

[SNIP!] - looks like the “less than” symbol is interpreted by browsers as a tag opening which totally destroys the formatting of the page and causes most of the code not to display… screenshots of the first and second (the database-looking-up-…in-functions. The third is long and… you get the idea.

The first two basically look up data in my mass of arrays (they basically constitute a fat database). This is harder than it sounds because I was reluctant to make an array with more than two dimensions (it gets fiddly) so I made separate ones for unitInfo, weaponInfo and warheadInfo so to look up, say, the warhead used by Light Infantry, I have to first look up which weapon it used (simple) and then look in a different array for a weapon which has the same name as the one that my Light Infantry says he has (…fairly simple) and then look up which Warhead that weapon says it has and then check all Warheads to see if they have the same name and then retrieve their number and return it ARGH so it gets a bit odd but these two functions will save me a lot of time.

The last function is a neat damage calculator which essentially means fewer lines of code. I’m not sure why I didn’t program a standalone damage calculating function before, but it might’ve been because of the bias toward being unhittable and being able to kill enemies in one shot instead of how much damage would actually be done - I had no concrete data in version 1.

This version is still far from perfect and I’ll need to incorporate aircraft being unhittable by most weapons while in flight and change the way in which suggestions are printed (the recommendation values are no longer integers, and you can’t have a two-point-seven-sixth row. A two-hundred-and-seventy-sixth row maybe, but that’d make the page looong… rounding would defeat the purpose of exact stats. I think I’ll just print them in order in a single paragraph… lol.

I think Elliot is working on putting in more accurate data into the version 1 database - but I think I forgot to tell him that the recommendation rating - which is affected by stats - has to be an integer or the unit simply won’t appear in the suggestions box…

Anyway, I have made progress and will keep making it. And then upload it.

Pax

Over the past few days I’ve been working obsessively on a JavaScript-powered tactical advisor for Tiberian Sun players. It’s been quite hard to get it working, but now it is and although the units’ stats are somewhat dodgy, overall the system just about works. However, it’ll require a LOT of tweaking. Perhaps I’ll ask the people at TiberiumWeb.com to give me details unit stats from the .ini files of Tiberian Sun and then I can produce some accurate way to compare them (one which takes into account armour, exact number of hitpoints, exact damage dealt per shot, rate of fire… maybe even buildtime if this becomes a lot more complex than I think I can handle…).

It’s been a good exercise - before this, I’d never touched switch statements or Arrays.

For now, here it is.

Pax

Before I begin, I’ll just clarify the situation: at some point in my youth my grandfather gave me some pirate copy of Tiberian Sun which I played with interest. It felt like quite an odd game and I didn’t really think of it as part of the mainstream gaming media. I saw Firestorm in some shop one day and made my uncle buy it. It had a manual! I began to suspect that this elusive “Westwood Studios” company was in fact well-funded and professional. Then I bought Red Alert and to top it all off, Red Alert 2 came out. I didn’t buy it but my friends did and then they bought Generals etc. and then after massive disc loss, I bought The First Decade and preordered Tiberium Wars. So here I am.

Right. Now, I think the reason I prefer Tiberian Sun to, say, Red Alert 2 (which is dementedly fun) is that it’s a bitch. No superweapon disabling! Retarded Harvester AI! Veins! It makes it hard to play. The Hunter-Seeker - so annoying BUT it kicks everyone out of apathy and says “Look, play well or die.” The EMP and Firestorm walls give enemy tank/plane rushes and missiles the finger. The tactical possibilities were just great. Conversely, Red Alert 2? Race to build superweapon. If superweapons are disabled, race to build 5 Prism Tanks or 5 Apocalypses. Assuming you’re not a dumbo, you can just go and win.

I wonder what Tiberium Wars is like. In a strange way, I don’t really want to find out.

Pax

You can just keep building cranes. What the fuck, man?! It’s micromanagement on steroids! A who-can-click-all-the-tabs-at-once competition! FUCK! And I barely got the hang of having a separate “Support Structures” tab in Red Alert 2.

Pax

Well, I haven’t heard from Elliot since he finished the C&C3 installation so I’ll assume that it’s either very good or it’s killed him. I attempted to run it on my Dad’s very small Vaio but it crashes after less than a minute and brings up that welcomed error report dialogue (”cnc3game.dat has encountered a problem…”). Snippets from the web imply that it’s to do with copy protection in some cases but also that it may be to do with mobile processors - I guess I’m getting an iMac instead of a MacBook then!

Reviews predictably reviewed what previews predicted: C&C3 is a predictable amalgam of the older titles in the series but graphically polished. Good but not great, apparently. Eh, that’s fine. I like Command & Conquer. It does not make me sick.

I think other people have started revising for “GCSEs”.

Hmmm.

Pax