C++ : ChatMarkov

Source (GitHub, MSVC++ 2010 EE)
License

Made a program to generate new chatlogs based off of old ones.  It uses a system known as Markov chains to build each sentence.

In simplespeak, the program goes through your chatlog and builds a dictionary of all unique words, as well as the probabilities that each word will follow another.  The program then uses these probability tables to ekk out a fake conversation.

Currently in early alpha.  Feel free to fork the project and add your own modifications.

You Broke The Big Thing! : Finished

Quick game for NeoTalon's RGB Comp 2012 .  Instructions are in F1.

Download

Extremely short game with the premise that you broke the thing and now you're out to fix the thing.

Critiques so far run from " ...What the heck did I just play?" to "That was... a thing."

The timelapse is really awkward.  Features a strange image that my friend sent, and me Skyping with my shirtless dad.

orange made me a thing!

It's an animated version of my avatar in his Saga of the Ugly 2 drawing style.  Thanks, orange!

Music : Message Intercepted

Website - http://messageintercepted.com/
SoundCloud - http://soundcloud.com/message-intercepted
YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/ZekkaYaku

Was introduced to breakcore today by a digital composer whose been making music for some years now; I had heard of music from the genre but could never pair a name to it apart from "industrial glitch maybe perhaps?" which was always frustrating to type.  Ended up listening to a lot of songs by said composer.  They're pretty great.

Most of them feature a fairly kick-heavy drumline and abrupt transitions, but the really distinguishing plus is his use of samples in a way that's varied and innovative without clashing.  The track above, Transforming Robot, showcases a glitchy drumtrack with an ambient section stuck in the middle.  Surprisingly, it blends very, very well.

Would encourage you to listen to more of the tracks because I'm having a hard time describing it.  Definitely one of the better hobbyist techno composers I've heard of.

What is so good about The Scream?

If you're unfamiliar, "The Scream" is a painting made by Edvard Munch around 1893-1910.  It recently sold for ~$119 million dollars.

Seriously, what's so good about this?

Yes, it's a historical piece of art.  Yes, its fame derives a lot from its age and influence.  And I've been staring at it while writing this post, and yes, I guess I kind of like the colors of the water and the sky.  They look deep and bold.

But what the heck is with the focus of the picture: the actual scream?  People seem to say that the scene looks and feels like "a thriller," or they can feel the darkness and anxiety of the subject.  How?  I certainly don't.

Of course, this is probably a matter of tastes.  I've always been a fan of, in the words of a show my sister was showing me yesterday, the "double-layer trap" in creative works.  If you're writing a sad book, you shouldn't use the words "sad," "depressed," "gloomy," etc.  Likewise, if you're directing a sad movie, you shouldn't pepper it with excessive crying and slow-mo.  And if you're painting a sad painting, you shouldn't have to pour a gallon of gray paint all over your work and say, "aha!  My colors are dark!  My painting is now officially saddening!"

If your work is good, it should lend itself to the emotion you're targetting.  And if it's not, slapping a crying man in the picture isn't going to help you.

I'm not criticizing Munch.  Wait, yes I am.  Not that I have the authority or qualifications to (I'm an awful artist), but in my extremely unprofessional opinion, "the scream" takes a whole lot of potential out of "The Scream."

C++ : Symbolic Regression - Part 1

I'm not dead.  Just working on something that's taking an awful long amount of time.  That's my excuse for my recent post-truancy.

'Wired: Computer Self Discovers Laws of Physics'

See that article up there?  Click on it.  No?  Fine, here's what it says in a nutshell.  Some people over at Cornell University stuck a bunch of LED lights onto a chaotic pendulum, hooked up an LED detector onto a computer, and fed the data through some fancy algorithms based on symbolic regression that calculated the gravity equation from scratch.

Sounds complicated?  It's not.  It's actually extremely simple.  Here's the generalized workflow:

1. Feed some data into the computer, like the positions of the LED lights.  These are your state variables.
2. Use some fancy maths to find the partial derivatives between the state variables.  Partial derivatives are used to calculate relations between variables.
3. Generate thousands of equations randomly, and use genetic algorithms for mutation (value mutation, crossover, etc.).  The equations that match the data the closest (via plugging in values) have the highest priority in mutation.  This is the symbolic regression step.
4. Repeat step 3 a hundred thousand gazillion times and after an infinite number of iterations you should converge to the exact equation that fits the data.

That's all.  It's very simple.

Programming Symbolic Regression

The main programming obstacles here are as follows:

1. Building equations in program-my form.  There's a predetermined set of operators made into functions and stored as function pointers (add(a,b), sub(a,b), mul(a,b), div(a,b), sin(a), cos(b), among others).
2. Solving partial derivatives symbolically.  I have no idea how to do this yet but I'm sure it's not that hard?
3. Optimizing it so it doesn't take a hundred thousand years to calculate something nice.

 That's the gist of it.  If I make any progress I'll mention it on the blog.

If you're interested in your own research, here's the material for the Cornell project.  It's a little intimidating to read but isn't all that bad; most of the unfamiliar terms can be figured out in context.

Overview: Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data
Supporting Online Material

This Town (ABEFTTOU) : Ludum Dare Entry

This Town (ABEFTTOU) made for Ludum Dare 23 in 48 hours.  Runs on XNA, so the download leads to an installer.  If anyone knows how to compile standalone XNA executables please tell me kthnx.

Timelapse:

Postmortem

The Good:

1. GitHub is so beautiful! I cloned my half-finished OOP engine and worked on the engine alongside the game.  The cool thing is, the engine code remains separate from the game.  If I wanted to add, say, animated sprites to the game, I'd set it up in the engine, merge them, and have GitHub resolve the conflicts.  Ended up with not only a finished game but a patched up engine as well.
2. Small, concise idea that could actually be finished.
3. Having drafted the idea for the game before starting.

The Bad:

1.  Use something you're familiar with, dangit!  Should've used Game Maker or Flash, both way easier and faster to dev in than C#/XNA.
2. Figure out how to compile the game before submitting.  No one who didn't previously have XNA already could play the game at first because it wasn't packaged with the framework.  Stupid me.  And an addendum, people with weak graphics cards still couldn't play because I compiled it in HiDef mode unnecessarily and accidentally.  Stupid me.
3. Leave an hour or so for balancing and bugfixes.  Pretty much crippled the game.