Check that out! Hehe 
Archive for April, 2007
Thought Chess was cool? How about quantum mechanics chess? This would be fun to play against a person who doesn’t know the rules. 
And even more fun to play in a huge tournament. Or, would that be just a big headache?
Check it out here.
This is SO cool.
What it is is a Cellular Video Synthesizer.
This is how it works:
We use a simple 1 dimensional, elementary cellular automata in this example. More info on it can be found here.
The three knobs allow the cellular automata to be adjusted in some fun ways. The knob on the left controls the width of the board, from 1 cell to 32 cells. The center knob is used to select one of the 256 possible rules. And the knob on the right controls the iteration speed.
The button is used to clear rows. As long as it is held down, all the cells in the row will be forced to the dead state.
To make the cellular automata a little more exciting, we have also added sound and color. The color of each cell is based on how long a cell has stayed alive. So if a cell is alive from one row to the next, its color will be different on each row.
The sound is even more arbitary, but still based on the celluar automata. To obtain some interesting sounds we calculate a frequency for each row. There is no ‘right’ way to do this, so we played around until something cool happend. This is what we came up with: go through all the cells in a row and if a cell is alive, multiply the current frequency by that cells color (a number 1 - 5). If the cell is dead, do nothing.
Hehe, it’s like … a form of art!
Here is the link to their page, here, and to the Maker pager, here.
John S Canning, an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre, Dahlgren Division has proposed a new set of laws to govern what killer robots do, or don’t do. To read what he said, click here for the pdf.
I didn’t read the pdf, but I read the article (here)
“The difficulty comes when the automatic battlers need to target humans. In such cases Mr Canning says that permission from a human operator should be sought.
“Let machines target other machines,†he writes, “and let men target men.—
This hits the nail on the head- and I partially agree. Although humans shouldn’t be killed at all (except for a few exceptions), robots can blow up other robots. However, that does leave room for error. What would happen if a robot thought it was going to blow up an opposing robot, but it blew up a human instead? 
The 3 laws of robotics- Too restrictive? I suppose so, for war robots. However, wouldn’t it be better to be safe, rather than sorry? What would happen if a robot killed his own man? Not only would in anger Americans, but it would also give off a bad taste for robotics.
No doubt, this will be a frustrating and bumpy ride- defining what a killer robot is allowed to do, or not allowed to do.
The 25th edition of Bell MRSTF was pretty cool. Basically, it is the regionals science fair for ALL the English speaking (and some french) schools in Montreal. It was 3 days long, each was very busy. On Sunday, it was routine setup, housekeeping, and some public viewing.
On Monday, for our exhibit it was action packed. For one thing, we were accused in the morning of plagarising this project off of a McGill University student. Quite odd, yeah! Of course we didn’t plagarise- the idea came out of MY head. Perhaps the guy that he was talking about plagarised it off of me, which would be funny. We had 5 judges, only about 2 of them were awkward. Since we finished being judged right at lunch, my dad took us (Anne-Marie & I) to Timmies. The food was great, and everything– but when we came back, the robot was trashed! We were told that there would be excellent security here.
After much discussion, everything seemed to go all right. On the third day, lots of people came, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to give skittles out. This basically ruined our whole marketting scheme for our project, oh well! Finally- at 2 was the awards ceremony.
We recieved 1st place, and 50$ (each) from McGill and L’ecole Polytechnique. I was quite thrilled with those! — untill, the awards from Concordia, some of which I had my eye on– went to a different project. One whom I asked: “Can I see your program?” and they said “No, it’s not on this computer. Our mentor made it though, but we understand it!”. Seeing that group win was a real heartbreaker. I coded the robot myself, in NQC. I looked up the methods and functions in the API. Why couldn’t they? Yet, they won more prize money and awards?! It basically ruined the whole Science Fair. To add to the manner, I didn’t get chosen to move on to provincials or Intel ISEF. I would have really appreciated just the mere prescence of being there at one of those science fairs. Heh, I think they seriously have some issues regarding Lego, because our project was really great.
So, if I didn’t include the sour parts of the Science Fair, it was a pretty good time. BUT, you need good shoes to be able to stand in for long amounts of time. Hopefully next year will be better!