Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is awesome.

Update

See previous post.

• Imagine Cup: I submitted my entry and got a perfect score. Whether or not I get to go to Cairo now depends on how they break ties. Since it wasn't difficult to get a perfect score there will probably be many people competing for the top six positions.


• AIspace video: Video is finished! We are competing in the one minute category.


• Temporal neural networks: New version released at http://byronknoll.com/pattern.html. I haven't set up the database to collect pattern data yet. The neural network is initialized randomly when it loads.


• I migrated my webpage from Google Pages to UBC CS hosting and bought a domain name from Go Daddy.

Hotmail/Gmail/Google Pages

After having used Hotmail for the last several years, I am finally trying to switch to Gmail. I found this useful guide that shows how Gmail can automatically import all old emails from Hotmail and forward incoming messages. I started the process over a day ago but the import process is only about half finished (apparently it takes a long time to import ~10,000 emails).

Google Pages is shutting down. Their new web hosting service is called Google Sites. Google Pages has been a perfect host for my webpage, so I am pretty upset that they are stopping the service. Google Sites definitely does not have the features needed for my webpage. Can anyone recommend a new (preferably free) hosting service I can use?

Summer Projects

• RoboCup: Our team somehow managed to qualify in the small size league for RoboCup 2009. I have been working on the AI. We still have a ton of work to do before we are ready for the contest. Hopefully I will get to go to Austria for the event.


• Imagine Cup: I am in round two of the robotics and algorithm contest. There are over 200 people in round two and only six people advance to round three. The first round was a sumo simulation. The second round is a mars rover simulation. I can get a perfect score in the second round. Since I'm sure over six people will get a perfect score, the tie breaker for the top six spots is "Functional Completeness and Complexity" (bleh). If I make it to round three, I get a free trip to Cairo.


• Netflix prize: Now that I have actually taken a machine learning course, I have a few new ideas to try out. I think I will continue trying to use neural networks, mostly because I feel like I can't compete with the algorithms that the top contestants use.


• AIspace video: I am working on a short video of AIspace for the AAAI video competition.


• The Bootstrapped Learning Cup: an AI contest taking place later this summer.


• Physics based puzzle game: see previous posts.


• Temporal neural networks: I have made a new version of my pattern recognition program. The new version can predict patterns of arbitrary lengths (not constrained by the number of memory layers). I will post the new version on my website when I have some free time. I might also put a database on my computer that automatically collects data from the applet. This would allow the neural network to learn from patterns from all previous users. I got a network to successfully count from 0 to 100 in binary based entirely on pattern recognition (input: 011011100101110111100010011010...)

Theft Attempt #2

Once again somebody tried to steal my bike. This time the theft attempt completely mangled the bike lock so that it was impossible to open. I managed to convince housing that it was my bike and they opened it with a motorized saw.

Lock #1

Lock #2