Random Thought

Can you be "fluent" in a programming language? Or does fluency require you to speak it?

AI Challenge

AI Challenge is an interesting, Google-sponsored multi-agent systems contest, that looks a lot like a competition held for a course I followed last year.
Up to 8 teams of ants are pitted against each other on random maps, and have to explore, gather food and must plan and cooperate intelligently to defeat their rivals.

I was really compelled to join the competition, but I rather late to discover it, and moreover, too busy with other work. Maybe next time!

Euler Project

Problem 19: How many Sundays fell on the first of the month during the twentieth century?

Problem 24: The lexicographic permutations of 0, 1 and 2 are:
012 021 102 120 201 210

What is the millionth lexicographic permutation of the digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9?

Just two examples of questions posed by Project Euler, a list of 336 mathematic programming exercises (and counting).

Some are quite challenging, some are rather easy. But with the easier ones it's often still fun to find a solution that's nice and efficient. And a 'good' solution ought to give the answer in less than a minute. The number of Sundays in the 20th century, from the example above, happens to be *very* simple to approximate accurately, by just taking 1/7th of the total number of days.

I challenged myself to solve them all in one month. So far I've been working in Python, but maybe I can use this as an excuse to learn some new languages. Current status: 22 down, 314 to go!

Update November 2011: Well, one month was just a little overoptimistic. But I've made slow but steady progress, having currently solved nearly a hundred problems. They do get a lot more difficult than the examples I gave though.

Finally completed a big Object Tracking project!

That was quite a lot of work (several weeks of Matlab programming), but also really fun. Together with a classmate I implemented a so-called mean-shift tracker, allowing us to follow objects in video.

Here's an example, showing how our object tracker finds his Nemo.



Now I can *finally* have a little vacation and get back to a game of Europa Universalis 3...

Migration complete!

New, extreme makeover, refurbished, revitalized! Or I guess you could also say it's mostly old text in a new template. Anyway, I think this looks way better than my old site, and switching to Blogger makes it much easier to update and maintain.

Work in progress!

This site is currently under construction. When finished, it will replace my old site at www.junuxx.net.