brainwagon

I spend what I think is a very substantial part of my life thinking. Not the usual kinds of thinking, like what am I having for dinner, how much money is left in my checking account, or whether the people I work with like and respect me. Don’t get me wrong: I do spend time […]

I haven’t had any time to work on my checkers program with any degree of concentration. I was trying to work out some of the details in creating an endgame database, and thought that maybe I could prototype an example fairly quickly. The particular endgame I was most interested in was the 3 kings versus […]

I’m on what is scheduled to be my last week of production on Ratatouille. If my blog isn’t fascinating in the degree that you have come to expect, that’s probably one of the reasons. I haven’t had much time for extra-curriculars. I’ve had a blast on Ratatouille, and hope you all enjoy it when it […]

My wife has been trying to get me to listen to a song called “Code Monkey” from someone named Jonathan Coulton. I didn’t have any idea who he was, but somehow today I ended up at his website listening to a song called Chiron Beta Prime. It’s a free download from his website, and it […]

My brother mocked my use of ffmpeg to create flash video as I did a couple of days ago. He sent me this set of command line options for the Swiss Army knife of video encoders: mencoder. I went ahead and encoded the classic civil defense film “Duck and Cover”, and then used the flvtool2 […]

I dropped in at work over the weekend (we are in the final death throes of production on Ratatouille, so I’m basically doing 7 days a week for the next couple of weeks) and noticed that the traffic along 80 was pretty bad. I didn’t think too much of it, but apparently the cause was […]

My checkers program has developed some annoying quirks (read: bugs) and I haven’t made any good progress in figuring them out, except to assertain that most of them appear to be centered around the use of transposition tables (when I disable the transposition tables, my program is much better behaved). Because I didn’t know what […]

During my lunchbreak, I ran across this miniscule chess program. Very, very neat. Micro-Max

Bruce Morleland has some excellent stuff on his Computer Chess page, including some details on transposition tables that seems useful.

Today was a miserable day for my checkers program. I suspected that some of the cases that were causing me some difficulty in the puzzles that I have attempted to date were caused by some problems with my alphabeta search. To resolve this, I coded up some simpler versions and a simple version of minimax. […]

I didn’t realize that the data for The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was available for download as plain text files. Did you? Thanks to the Foxmath blog for pointing this out to me.

My checkers playing program milhouse is currently advancing at a good clip. I’ve added iterative deepening and a transposition table, and probably will add a history heuristic for move reordering to improve the search further. I’ve also started typing in a bunch of problems from Pike’s Little Giant Encyclopedia of Checkers Puzzles, and used them […]

Lennart has a nice writeup on automatic differentiation in Haskell. I keep trying to come up with a reason to learn more about Haskell, and examples like this (which are difficult or at least less understandable in C or C++) go quite some way in convincing me that I should invest the time to understand […]

Caught Sam’s cat on the wireless webcam, but mostly this is just a test of the embedded flash player. Addendum: Here is WP-FLV, the WordPress Plugin you need. Addendum2: You can create flash video using only open source, free tools. I took the AtomBomb1946.mpeg from archive.org, and then ran: ffmpeg -i AtomBomb1946.mpeg -s 320×240 atombomb.flv […]

Well, I had maxed my vacation time out again, so was forced to take a day off. Oh darn. My son and I decided to take the opportunity for a little daytime baseball. Despite some early fear that it would be cold and windy, it was only a little windy, but a very nice day […]