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Entries from May 2019

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Entries from May 2019 (31 May 2019 at 23:48)

Well, nothing major to report this month, except at least we have some content: The conference I first showed my Reverse Emulation project at in 2018 (Deconstruct) finally posted the video of my talk, which was called "Improper Hierarchy." The talk is of course similar to the living room CRT video I put on youtube, but it might be interesting even if you've already seen that (watching it a year later, there are at least some funny ad-libbed parts IMO!). The video production is very high quality (in general the conference was very well run and the speaker experience in particular I heartily endorse) but also quite serious-seeming, so I like how it comes across as some bizarro-world TED talk.

This month I've made some progress on another video, which maybe I can wrap up this weekend. Nothing too grandeur, though. Sometimes hard to keep that under control!

Also: I played through Minit, which was a really excellent and creative little game (can finish it in an evening) that I super recommend. I just started The Messenger which definitely has some charms and surprises; I need to finish it before I can decide between "good" and "great" but I think I can at least recommend it if you like exploration-style platformers.

(2 comments — almost 6 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from April 2019

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NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS (30 Apr 2019 at 23:41)

I was hoping to have a few things to write about in this month, but the only thing I finished was this video for SIGBOVIK, right at the beginning:

NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS

There is also the paper which has some merits but I submitted that before actually finishing the project, so I think the video is the definitive version. Either way this one is really aimed at trolling computer scientists, and so may be impenetrable if you don't have the background; sorry about that!

Allergies and various things have got me down recently but it's also getting nice out, which should provide a burst of energy!! This weekend is the Marathon in Pittsburgh, which I intend to run. No costume plans but sometimes I get last minute inspiration / compulsion. Feel free to taunt me with your ideas.

Categories: hacks video sigbovik

(4 comments — almost 6 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from March 2019

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CHESSBOVIK (31 Mar 2019 at 21:49)

Well, here we are on the eve of SIGBOVIK 2019. I'm in the midst of a long day of video-making for one of my projects, but I can get 2 for the price of 5 by posting now about four of my papers. This year I've been on a chess kick, which I think I've successfully gotten out of my system by writing all these (previous posts alluded to there being five, but one of them didn't really go anywhere and/or just became part of the other(s)). They are sort of intertwined:

Survival in chessland is about how to stay alive if you are being a chesspiece to the death

Color- and piece-blind chess is about, among other things, playing chess without being able to tell what the pieces are (only where they are)

Elo World, a framework for benchmarking weak chess engines is about exploring the full spectrum of computer chess play

CVE-2018-90017117 #KingMe is just a short joke, but based on a true story

My last paper is on a different (maybe even weirder?) topic, and I'm putting together a video for it now, so I should be uploading that tomorrow some time. It's been a bit rough going, though, since I replaced my computer a few months ago and forgot that I hadn't actually set stuff up for this kind of work; I'm experiencing small problems like custom key commands aren't set, and bigger problems like audio drivers acting crazy. Looks like I will be able to finish with some vacation time, at least.

Speaking of vacation, this month we also went to Belize, which was pretty cool. The highlight for me was swimming/scrambling 1km into a cave ("Actun Tunichil Muknal") to access an approximately 1000 year-old Mayan site where they performed human sacrifices; it's remarkable because almost all of the artifacts are still in situ, including a number of calcified human skeletons. Was pretty wild. I got some good running done, found some New Haven-style pizza (!?), and wrote papers about chess (?!).

Categories: sigbovik hacks

(5 comments — a year ago) [ comment ]

Entries from February 2019

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Oops, February is short (28 Feb 2019 at 23:47)

Wow, the end of February really snuck up on me! I wrote this on the morning of March 1 and backdated it. :(

Aside from some uninteresting work travel and a bit more progress on Pac Tom, the main notable thing from February was work on my SIGBOVIK papers. It is now possible to submit, so you can too! Thank you for your suggestions for my chess paper (see previous post); it's not too late for more ideas there. I also have one non-chess paper, which turned out to be pretty fun. For that I spent a solid chunk of the weekend manually routing this bad boy:

Design rules check pass!

It may end up to be too hard to solder, but isn't it aesthetically pleasing?

(5 comments — almost 6 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from January 2019

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All you gotta do is recognize the problem and then solve it (31 Jan 2019 at 22:39)

OK, so I think I have five SIGBOVIK papers about chess, which is pretty over the top, but at least I can get it all out of my system. If you like, you can help me out: Today I'm on the lookout for a collection of easy to describe algorithms for playing chess. Some constraints: They should be basically symmetric when playing as white or black (so not like, "move pieces to the 1st rank" but "move pieces as far from their starting squares as possible"). They do not need to be good at chess, and in some ways it's better if they're not, although it's not good if they just get stuck in loops like moving the same piece back and forth. They have to be efficient enough to compute a move in a few seconds. Most importantly, it should have a one or two-sentence description which pretty much communicates the whole idea without important ambiguity. Alpha-beta and that kind of thing I already know about; novel approaches are most desirable here.

Aside from the bracing cold, which you can just read about in the news, I'm nearly done with a game called Hollow Knight. It's really good, definitely the kind of artful indie game I was yearning for when I deleted Battlefield V shortly after writing last month's post, and I super recommend it. And also in quick turnarounds from last month's dreary post news, a day later or so I figured out the thing that had me stuck on that machine learning problem (it was basically just NaN poisoning) and now the only problem I have left is that machine learning isn't magic. But I guess things are looking up on multiple counts!

That is all!

(5 comments — almost 6 years ago) [ comment ]

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