We had two final project presentations today for CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence). Both were among the five who worked on the Roguelike game Angband. Our goal was to look at specific behaviors and improve them.

The first student, Dave Lupo, wanted to improve the tendency of the BenBorg (by Ben Harrison) to be a shopaholic. He trained a feedforward artificial neural net (ANN) using backpropagation to compute a better "dive motivator". This lowered the ratio of time in town vs. dungeon, and he found that increasing the ratio of "time in the dungeon" to "time in town" increased survivability.

Dave plotted the "time in town vs. time in dungeon" curve for 13 characters before his improved dive function, and 14 characters after, and found that they did have higher XP-to-move ratios. He speculated that they had higher survivability as a result, though these results were inconclusive. (I suggested that he look at the slope of the line to see if ' it really improved survivability.)

Now, here's the funny part. The points were all at time of character death, because he lost most of the characters at low levels, but I was sure he didn't lose them all by level 14, so I asked him what the rightmost point was. "Oh, that's time of death after 150000 turns". I asked, "what do you mean, after 150K turns?" He replied that to impose a time limit, he didn't just end the borg run at 150K; he sets "target level = 99" so that it essentially goes: "Morgoth... I'm comin' to get you!" and commences a Rambo-esque death dive!

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Banazir

Let's start with this rendition of "Dragostea Din Tei" by the Romanian pop band O-Zone, posted in Youtuber form by inever. (Yes! Blame her! I looped it. Ying tong ying tong ying tong ying tong ying tong iddle i po!)

( Version one: Clone of the Star Wars Kid )
( Version two: Thai teunce )
( Version three: Darth Rebus )

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Banazir

jereeza! miyeko!
Look what I found!

It's the Winter 1990 issue of Whole Earth Review:

( The Misery Manga - two large panels )

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Banazir

From #teunc chat, reposted by request.

Setting: mid-19th century London
Cast:

Tripitaka - a London street urchin
banazir - a Nazgul Sith and a Jedi Hobbit
figgylicious (Figgy) - a schoolteacher
taiji_jian (Paganini) - a passerby

( The script - long )

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Banazir

If the first instant message had been treated with the same pomp and dignity as the first Morse code message, it might have read... "OMGWTFINTERNET".

That is all.

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Banazir
(oh, and check out the new "phone" icon)

Until you've seen someone dissolve a human hand off with vomit, there's just something missing in your life.

In Cronenberg's much-lauded remake of The Fly, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) dissolves Stathis Borans' hand and foot by regurgitating his corrosive fly vomit on it. My uncle described this at the time (1986), and I didn't think much of the idea, but you have to see it to grok the whole vomit drop phenomenon.

I taped the campy sequel, The Fly II, but it's been 5-6 years since I saw it. Not only does "Martinfly", genetic successor to "Brundlefly", dissolve limbs, but as this review notes, he gets the head of one of the evil overlord's guards (warning: very graphic). Also, the movie is worth while just to see Daphne Zuniga chewing the scenery. She's further over the top here than as Princess Vespa in Spaceballs. No, really!

Also, note to bioinformaticians: what gene expression modeling program is complete without Skin Lump Simulation?



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Banazir

Two bits of weirdness from two wonderfully weird people:

• From gondhir:
  The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny


• From jereeza:
  Darth Vader: The Musical (The Sith Lord of the Opera)

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Banazir

Salvation is in sight! Well, OK, no it isn't, but if I don't start seeing some results soon, I will uninstall Vista and put XP Pro back on Hirilonde, so there, nyah.

( Earlier problems and an update )

Now for the new questions:
( Less memory-intensive variants of Photoshop, Word, Powerpoint, Firefox? )
( Text-mode application sniffers for IM and shells )
( Turning off things in Windows )

( April Fools' Day pranks )
( Dictionary definition of `banazir' )
( Mmm, pie )

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Banazir

OK, here are the final choices! Please vote for one.
(I broke ties according to how I voted.)

( Firefly Pick-Up Line Contest, voting round 2 of 2 )

In other news:
1. zengeneral is eViol for introducing me to this.
2. Who among you has seen The Brick Testament (who wasn't shown it by yours truly)? Some of the expressions are just... classic.
3. Don't forget to enter this year's contest by Mon 09 Jan 2006!

Twelfth Day of Christmas, following my personal LJ tradition (started in 2003):
"Gather the Grain"
Words: Fanny Crosby (1901)
Music: Charles H. Gabriel

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Banazir

Warning: illegal punning in a built-up area. Cross-posted from this entry in teunc, so don't trask me if you've heard it already.

( CAUTION: really, really, REALLY awful joke )

Running like Angband,
Banazir

If you'd like a Christmas postcard or CD, please reply here with your snail-mail address or send an e-mail to hsuwh[AT]hotmail.com if you have not done so.

Getting caught up: I've finally posted the computer problems for last week.

My request for help with the second tanelos soundtrack, and tanelos reviewing, is also up.

Also: Hey, zerovector, look at the last entry here on the Journal of Machine Learning Gossip (JMLG) page!

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Banazir

Cross-posted from teunc.

The redoubtable Dwarf gondhir presents us with this chilling creation from Klaus Enzikat, the artist of the German edition of LOTR. This is worse than the kiwis on the cover!
( Commentaries )

In other news:

• I am swamped, and that's a fact. Today, I spent the morning catching up on CIS 490/730 (Intro AI) and CIS 732 work, then dashed to six afternoon meetings: three with students, then a Graduate Council meeting, then the Ecological Genomics one, then a make-up meeting of the Decision Making Agents meeting. EcoGen posters are due in nine days. Whew!


• Speaking of Decision Making Agents, massforge is off to a good start, but we really need to get coordinated on the GUI development and the web site.


• The Google-KFL-Microsoft hearing is done. Now we wait; Judge González is due to rule on Tuesday 13 Sep 2005.

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Banazir

ROFL!

Posted by atomistictheist, from here, with fan submissions here.

These remind me of SomethingAwful's childrens' books (more here) and of these (so wrong!)

Edit, 09:45 CST Thu 18 Aug 2005 - I added the second link SomethingAwful.com link above.

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Banazir

Seen with belasco - the Windows warning dialogue maker:



( Read more... )

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Banazir