Benford Does Stuff

Time for the annual Raft Rally Outdoor Adventure. Where the PCF crew and some of Refuge go out and simultaneously confront their collective fears of water, heights, and closed spaces.

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I gave the final presentation for honeyB last Wednesday (4/23) and it went very well. Non computer science types were easily able to pick up the basics of my project, and I even got an article in the campus newspaper!

A mac mini trying to run 100+ bees is quite the humorous task. For a total of 5 CS presentations we ended up bringing four computers to the presentation room. One windows PC was brought over for powerpoint, as well as the xanTunes network media player demo and the Underworld AI poker projects by Xander and Randall respectively. Kyle also used that PC to demonstrate his Nintendo DS western (1866 era) city simulator.  Two mac minis were there as well, one for my project, and one for Sarah’s Quilting Revolution. Since both Xander and Randall had network oriented projects, they needed a second windows PC t run as a client. We were quite thankful for KVM switches by the end of the day

I was the 3rd of 5 presenters, so my mini was crunching away at running a beehive for the first hour of presentations. By the time I was ready to demo, my hive had grown to over 100 bees, which slowed everything down significantly.

I was especially appreciative of the support of all of my friends and family who came to see the presentation.

There was a CS afterparty in which we spent time not worrying about the projects that we finally got done, so all was well.

Hey all. I have a second movie of my senior project ready. It seems that youtube was either having trouble or didn’t like Safari or Opera, so it took me a while to upload the video.  This represents the program in its final form. All classes of bees have been implemented and most of the undesired bugs have been eliminated. It just makes me wish that the presentations for this thing were not so soon (4/23). 

I’ve got a quick movie ready for anyone who wants to see how my senior project is going. Blue bees bring in food from the outside world and green bees deposit the food into honeycomb cells.  

I’ve been making some headway on my senior project. One of my main concerns was how to tell a bee object to go to the location of its target (say, a honeycomb), and then proceed to go there while facing in that direction.  The cool thing is now I’ve solved that problem by making the bee take the difference between its current location and its target’s location, and travel along that vector. In other news, my roommate’s laptop and my router seem to be feuding. Regardless of which wifi card we put into his laptop, the router will refuse to give his computer an IP address. His computer uses a Chinese-language version of Windows XP, making things much more complicated for me to diagnose. Next on the “try to install windows list” is Windows XP 64 bit edition. This installer also bit the dust on my hardware (resulting in a  Machine Check Exception). I’m thinking that the problem centers around my add on SATA card. I have the driver disks but that does not seem to help. I might give vista another chance, but doing a slightly different install procedure. Evidently Vista will only recognize drivers if they are placed alone, on the root of a device. I’ll seriously have to consider dusting off some floppies now. I was surprised to see the day when Linux had better hardware support than Windows. Woohoo! 

Hello all. I’ve had some trouble with the server in the past week do to some IP address changes so I was unable to post for a while.

The Spring semester has started and though I have no significant homework in other classes, my senior project, set to be due in 8 weeks, is taking up the majority of my free waking hour. My goal is to make a simulation of a beehive, demonstrating how a distributed AI where many small things work together to make a collective decision can be more efficient than writing a monolithic AI to handle every task.

On the plus side my simulation (“honeyB”) can now do enough to cause significant slowdown on my less stellar testing machines, so I’ll have to work at the CS lab from now on if I want a lag free hive.

I also tried to install Windows Vista the other day, which was a less than stellar experience. It kept asking me for cd/dvd drivers yet it was obviously giving me this message from data on the dvd that it claimed it could not read. Good job with ~4 years of R+D Microsoft!