brainwagon

As part of my preparation for the Hackers conference, I decided to use open source software to make a nice presentation, and instead of presenting it on a laptop, use a DVD player as my presentation medium. I’ve been experimenting a bit with vcdimager, a VCD authoring system, and have made a couple of nice […]

While tinkering around the house the other day, I remembered that my wife’s old laptop had suffered some kind of win98 related meltdown (it claimed it was missing a dll and could no longer boot) and was in need of a new operating system. Simultaneously, I realized that I had some of these little 3″ […]

While killing an extra few minutes waiting for my wife to pick me up for the ballgame lastnight, I was surfing the web and found the webpage for ttyquake, a version of the original Quake ported to use the ASCII art library aalib. Digging around, I found that someone had written aatv, a program to […]

I was trying to decide on the easiest way to make a graphical user interface for the Scarne’s Challenge puzzle game that I’ve been experimenting with. I stumbled upon pygame, a simple game programming library that uses Simple DirectMedia Layer library to provide a fairly attractive environment for making simple games in Python. In just […]

My exhaustive testing indicated that the shortest path to the goal position in Scarne’s challenge was at least 71 moves long. I relaxed the criteria a bit, and obtained a solution which requires 72 moves, which (if I haven’t made an off by one error, still checking that out) is an actual minimal cost solution! […]

After running all night, I can assert with confidence that there are no paths of length 71 or less. I’m obviously not going to get to the ~100 move mark with the current heuristic and transposition tables alone. Addendum: I’ve actually just got a version of the game which doesn’t include the initial five “hopping” […]

After a couple more hours of typing, I managed to get a start on Scarne’s Challenge. I’ve got a simple version of IDA* with transposition tables working, along with a simple heurstic based entirely on summing the shortest path distance between where a node is and its desired final position. It is smart enough to […]

You can swap two pieces in place in Scarne’s challenge, but not in the normal 8 or 15 puzzles. This is because there are no odd length cycles in the 8 or 15 puzzles, but there are cycles of length three in Scarne’s challenge. The easiest way to see this is to draw the graphs […]

Well, I decided to start my exploration of the Scarne’s challenge by writing a simpler program to test out my recollection of how the A* algorithm worked. I chose to implement a simple version of iterative deepening A* for the 8-puzzle, the simple 3×3 sliding tile puzzle that perhaps might be more familiar as a […]

At the Hacker’s picnic the other day, Bill Ragsdale was trying to drum up interest in participating in writing computer players for Scarne’s Challenge, a solitaire boardgame first created in 1950. The board has 24 numbered spaces plus an empty center space, and 24 numbered tokens placed randomly. The idea is to slide pieces along […]

Excuse our dust. Eric Meyer’s book on cascading style sheets made me rethink the strategy and design of my website, and it will probably take a few more days of tweaking for the dust to settle. Hopefully the end design will be worth it. We’ll get back to real projects soon.

Yesterday I set my webcam grabbing images from television. I made some modifications to the frame grabber to archive time stamped versions of each image. The net result: a big directory of image files. I got it in my head to try to use these images to make image mosaics. These are images which are […]

I decided to dust off some of the old webcam software I wrote years ago and merge it into my home page. Right now it merely grabs a frame off of channel 45 once a minute, and stashes it at a standard URL. There is a teensy bit of JavaScript in my home page that […]

I was goofing around with PostScript some more, and the idea of making some fancy certificates or diplomas got into my head. But what good is a diploma if there is no school to back it up? Hence, as of this date, I hereby found Brain Wagon University. It is dedicated to the pursuit of […]