COSI for Credit Fall 2009 (MP151)

November is the last step in this semester-long project course. In trying to seek how to get the pattern in the program back, I had to learn about what neural nets actually are, simulated annealing, and weighted-majority algorithms. With help from my CS advisor (Tino), he explained and exemplified each of the three concepts.

I started to sketch what one of my neural nets for the program might look like on paper. It turns out that there would be upwards of 10 hidden layers. The next step was to figure out what exactly I would want the threshold, or sigmoid function, to be. I am currently still wondering about how to go by this…

By mid-November, the focus shifted to another project, the MLK interactive Twitter display project. In order to make Martin Luther King Day 2010 at Clarkson different from all the other years, a group of volunteers thought it would be cool to have a performance, as well as an interactive Twitter display to communicate ideas in a modern and precise fashion. With the limit of 140 characters per tweet, it would be bound to produce some thought provoking ideas.

Basically, there will be 5 MLK day twitter accounts that will each represent a theme. Tweets posted from these accounts will be displayed and visualized through an interactive Processing application. This will be happening during the day as well as the performance.

During the performance (and dinner), there will be laptops available for tweeting. The Processing application will be displayed on a projected screen for everyone to see, and tweets would be refreshed every 30 seconds or so.

The part that I conquered this semester was easily the most difficult one, connecting to Twitter and displaying the Tweets! This was done with use of the Twitter4J library. I’ll probably open-source the code once I’m near completion,so that other universities and institutions can participate next year!

During the same time period, Pat Wilbur brought a Furby up to the labs, which we are planning to hack together. I spent some time researching the insides of a Furby, as well as trying to get the motor to work. The way a Furby operates is by the witty concatenation of gears. There is only one motor, so gear combinations drive the eyes, ears, and mouth. However, the motor seems to not work with the standard +5V. It doesn’t even move!

The semester closes out with thoughts of how to make a Furby work! With that note, November is complete!

October was an awesome month for progress on the project!

Though, at first it was really difficult. I tried three different ways of setting up a way to display circles.

The first way would be to use the control program, and display the circles in a new window. That didn’t work, because it was too laggy.

The second way would be to use the control program, but use the main window to draw the circles, and another window to display the control buttons. That also didn’t work because it was too laggy.

So I concluded that using a separate program, and have a file written and read continuously to transfer the data, would be the best route.

I used XML for this, and it works pretty good. From what I’ve played with, the control program needs to iterate every 100ms in order for the drawing program to not skip/miss some of the data.

Getting the XML code and the drawing code took a few weeks. I started off with the parent, action, and total conformity levels.

After it started to work the way I wanted it to, I let it iterate for a while to see what would happen. Originally, over 1000 iterations, one would be able to see a pattern where the conformity levels sort of ‘jump’ around, but in a pattern.

Since the program can now iterate forever, the pattern was pretty much lost! (That’s not good!!!)

I started to embark on a quest to get the pattern back… which leads me to the end of October!

That’s all for now!