Location Makes a Big Difference

Back home, they’re having a pretty big snowstorm. In contrast, we’re having a light snow. It seems every second day here we have about 2cm of snow. It all adds up in the end, and there’s quite a bit of snow lying around just chillin’. I’m starting to wonder if central Canada in general just gets most of their snow in small snow falls like we’ve been having, or large storms like back home? I miss the old Nor’ Easters that usually blow through. Today, my university is closed because it’s snowing really hard.

Back Home Right Now:

Downtown Ottawa Right Now:

EDIT:Live From Home:

Edit2:Live from here

What is AI?

What is Artifical Intelligence (AI)? Wikipedia call it “The term artificial intelligence is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: the intelligence that the system demonstrates. Among the traits that researchers hope machines will exhibit are reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence (or “strong AI”) has not yet been achieved and is a long-term goal of AI research.” Is that it? Can it really be summed up like that? Lets look at what’s in the name.

Artifical

In this era, we certainly know the word artifical. One could define it is the simulation of a natural object or substance using man made processes. We have, for example, artifical sugars, and artifical limbs. So why do we want to replicant natural things? We have several compelling reasons.

• Reduce Costs
  Every wants more money. Sometimes, the cost of something like natural grass, is a lot more cost prohibitive than say, astroturf. It could be both production or maintinence costs.
• Improvements
  Some artifical objects boast improvements over their natural cousins. Artifical sweetener is one such example: Diabetic users don’t have to worry about their blood sugar.
• Replacement
  Some natural things cannot be regained. A lost limb, for example, cannot be regrown (as we know of). For this reason, it may be nessesary to replace it with a reasonable copy.

Intelligence

We had it easy with artifical. Intelligence is a word of debate. Are dog’s intelligent? Are birds? Insects? Would a definition of ‘responding to stimuli’ be correct? I don’t think so. I think the definition of ‘being able to respond to the environment based of previous learned experiences’. The big point in that is ‘learned’. Once again, learning is fuzzy. You can learn that tacks can hurt, but also learn that sharp pointy things can hurt as well.

Artifical Intelligence

Lets put a few things together now. Would it be correct to say that artifical intelligence is the acquisition of information to be used to improve or replace a natural process? I think that’s pretty bang on. But does it fit our AI definitions of today? Game AI is notorious for being dumb, but for what reason? In the whole AI scheme, I think they lack the learning part. I had an interesting discussion about a game AI with a co-worker, and that in this game, the AI always does the predictable, and doesn’t vary from this pattern, as well as doesn’t change it’s tactic based on pass losses (that’s the whole learning part). Hard wired AI just can’t work, it’s not ‘learning’. Is a chess AI learning? Probably not. It probably know’s the rules, and knows how to find the best move (again, hard wired). I challange programmers to come up with an AI that starts out not knowing anything, and learns how to beat the player.

Are you up for it?

If you want something done, D.I.Y. Lasertag!

…Or at least have someone to help you out, like I do should I actually go through with it. Has anyone else even looked at that? It’s… insane at best. But let me get to the point. Laser Tag is fun, life generally isn’t, and I’m all for making life more fun.

An old hobby of mine was to use those WoW taggers (No, not World of Warcraft, Worlds of Wonder.) and prove my abilities in the twilight sky against the neighboors. Anybody remember those toys? Anybody here actually use any of those before? Show of hands, please. (Raises hand) The ones I once used aren’t any longer in stores, and as for LTTO (Lazer Tag Team Ops), it isn’t bad from what I understand, but I never tried it, and it’s not made anymore to my knowledge.

So I guess I’ll just need to invest some time, effort and cash into making my own. On the plus side, it is highly configurable. EXTREMELY configurable is more like it. And it beats spending ~$1,000 US for two. Bleah. I can build two for ~$500 US, possibly even less.

I think I will. Now I just need funding. Bleah again.

Remember to look through `emerge –depclean`

I was working on my little demo effect programs and when I tried to compile them, I got an error about -lSDL_gfx. After much head-scratching I realized that unmerging Frozen Bubble (or maybe it was Wesnoth?), media-libs/sdl-gfx went away when I –depclean-ed.

D’oh! Remember to add your dev libs to /var/lib/portage/world

Protection is a Lie

Yesterday, we had a power surge+outage at my office. (I didn’t even notice until the UPSes started beeping) Luckily, all the computers are on semi-new 6-month old UPSes which kicked in and did what they do best. Provide protection. I shut everything down and went home for the night. Next morning, I discovered my network hardware’s UPS had failed and toasted the router - a beautiful WRT54G-V2+DD.

Of course that particular router was serving DHCP and DNS to the whole network, resulting in /everything/ ceasing to function. Great! I managed to get the only server with a DHCP and DNS service (an XServe G5 - Piece of crap) configured in an hour or so and the network is only missing a little non-critical functionality.

Remember kids, just because you have something on a UPS does not make it invulnerable. Thank goodness it was only a $50 SoHo+woot router and not the server cluster.