My First Small Guitar Composition

I bought a guitar, though all credits goes to Karan, had it not for him, I would never thought or ventured out of the safe confines of home to buy. Learning guitar is tough and painful(for fingers), but the results are amazing. The sound of guitar (well I am overly biased and highly ignorant) is better than any other musical instrument. I am addicted and been playing an hour or so daily. Lets just hope the fad of Guitar does not wear for me… like blogging did recently.

I have been at it for the past 15 days, learning from the internet. Learnt some chords and tried changing between them, applied it to some songs too. But, most satisfying thing, I also composed a small tune, uses only 3 chords A D and G, nothing very great…

This second one is an attempt to do light string picking using only A and D chords and switching real slow between them.

Foodforce 2 Alpha Release

 

For all those readers of the blog, who have been following the Foodforce2 project, we have some good news! Alpha version of the game has been released now at : http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/downloads/list. The game is playable both on Windows and Linux platforms.

Also a new blog has been started for the project which will carry all the news regarding the game at : http://foodforce2.blogspot.com/

 

You are welcome to send in your feedbacks at foodforce2@gmail.com and can also tell us about what you feel in the comments section.

#nsit @ Freenode

You can find me on IRC at #nsit channel usually with the nickname “deepank” (yea yea I could not think of a better creative name!). Now, why this sudden urge to start a new channel at IRC for the college. Well first of all, its not my idea, it was Mohit’s idea originally and I brushed it aside that time.

This is how my thought process went : who wants to come to chat on IRC when there are many better chat clients available like Google Talk. But then I thought: hey there is one feature that Google Talk does not have. And the feature is: Chatrooms or channels. At IRC, a channel might contain hundreds of members who can all chat simultaneously on a single window. If you have never been on a noisy IRC Channel before, you might think that it will be hodge-podge, believe me it is not! Humans have a beautiful ability to self-organize when left on their own devices.

But this was not the only motive behind starting up with the IRC Channel. IRC has the unique marketing appeal of being geeky. It has been made hard to use with the lack of good IM Clients. Nearly all of them require you to learn to use commands, and using commands in today’s user-interface crazy world is a sure shot way of advertising that you are geeky :)

So, I believe that the new IRC Channel will attract all the programmers and geeks of the college. It will not have 100s of members, rather a very small following of 4-5 people at best. In the past two days, its membership has not gone past 5. But, I believe that the membership will rise slowly and steadily to over 10-20 people in 2-3 years.

The channel is here to stay… and I would love to hear back in comments.

AI Challenge

 

For those who do not yet know what AI Challenge is, I introduced it in a previous post here. Innovision’08 completed yesterday with the AI Challenge also being hugely popular and largely successful. We had 26 code entries for AI Challenge this time around with some of them spanning thousands of lines of code. This is roughly 250% increase in participation from the first edition of the AI Challenge in the year 2007. With over 96 teams (of 3 each) registering and 26 teams being able to successfully submit running codes, the challenge was hugely successful.

The simulations were done on-site yesterday with open invitations to participating teams to see the simulators crunching it out in real time. The teams were divided in 4 groups with the league stages involving matches of every team with every other team in the group twice. Two teams were then selected from each group to go into the Super 8 stage of the game from where we got our final 3 winning entries. But yesterday’s simulations were not all, the work on the challenge started around one and a half months back and it ran online for 15 days.

All the congratulations are due for Mohit, Vijit and Chirag as they have done some really wonderful work during this period. They have had sleepless nights, long debugging sessions and attended phone calls till 1 AM at nights while solving the queries of the participants. And I have still not counted the usual rigors of organizing an event. We have all learned a lot during this small period of time and I sincerely believe that the third edition of AI will be even better. Some of the additions planned for the next edition are : Graphical Simulator, Automated Code-runs and of-course minimal bugs.

So what are the next steps ahead of us:

1. Make the codes, rules and other docs available online at : http://code.google.com/p/ai-challenge/ in the downloads section of the project.

2. Write letters to winners asking if they would like their codes published online with due credits under the GPLv3 Licence.

So, the challenge will be still available for playing and you can still send us your entries at either (deepankgupta [AT] gmail [DOT] com) or (mohitgenii [AT] gmail [DOT] com). If we like your code, we will publish it online and provide you with detailed reports and logs on its performance against others.

Before I end, I want to thank all the 26 participating teams who took it as a personal challenge to develop some great codes and be a part of this wonderful event. Hope to hear your comments and complaints about the event here. 

AI Challenge and Digital Fortress

We all love challenges, and it is said that if you don’t challenge your brain too often, it will lose its usual brilliance. So, this time around, Innovision, our college’s tech fest presents among others these two technical events which will hopefully bring some entertainment and purpose in the lives of idle reader reading my blog right now. I will discuss briefly the two of them and tell you more about what goes into the making of such events.

AI Challenge: As the name suggests, it is all about Artificial Intelligence, with the theme of this year’s event being Soccer. Yes, you have to control a whole team of 11 players through your code, and your superior strategy should be able to defeat the other team’s code in a computer simulated soccer match.

The idea is simple and the simulator along with sample codes are already available on the website : www.aichallenge.inno.co.in . So, what goes into the making of such an event, well lots of coding! Obviously first, Vijit and Chirag came up with this wonderful idea complete with drawings on chart papers as to how the thing will work. Now, Mohit worked alongside these two brilliant people to formulate a set of rules keeping in mind that these should be simple, yet effective. Now, came the task of designing a simulator which will run the user codes against each other and simulate the whole task. Once, the simulator was made successfully, there were brainstorming sessions and simple sample codes were written and tested out so that an easy idea on how to approach the problem can be provided to the contestants. I was there as always, with the motivation and constant reminders of the mistakes that we committed during the previous edition of AI Challenge!

Digital Fortress: The idea here is to give the reign back to the early hackers/programmers and provide them with some REAL problems to work with. This is not the usual run-the-mill C/C++ programming contest, but rather contains questions which will involve a mix of programming across various domains, Internet based skills, hacking and a cool smart head on the shoulders.

The event’s brain is Assim who always gets these wacky ideas in his head and is a true hacker by his nature. I can simply write another blog post on this wonderful person, but I guess now is not the time. After running Enigmata successfully for two years, which involves solving puzzles, there came a thought, why not make puzzles with a technical flavor. So, came the Digital Fortress. Rohil and Ritwik have been working alongside him to develop some of the most difficult levels which I know would require some really good effort to get through. Looking forward to it getting started soon. Check out more details at: www.inno.co.in/onlineevents.php .

Lets throw the floor open to comments, rants and words of encouragement from participants and observers alike.

FoodForce 2 – Pre-Alpha Release

Finally, after close to around 3 months of hard-work, we, students of NSIT, are pleased to announce that we have released a pre-alpha version of FoodForce 2 game which we have been developing in co-ordination with OLPC and WFP. Most of the development work has been done by Mohit who has been instrumental(read night-outs) in getting the game released as per the schedule. I would also like to thank Manu for co-ordination with OLPC and Silke for her support with the artwork and constant motivation. The game can be played in Windows, Linux and OLPC Laptops.

FoodForce 2 has been designed to educate and motivate people to solve world hunger. Since the OLPC laptop reaches out to the developing and third-world countries, it also educates children and teachers in a village on how to achieve self sustenance in a fun and non-intrusive way. It also provides awareness about the work WFP has been doing for the past many decades to abate the problem of world hunger. Since an XO has limited computing power, the game has a relatively smaller footprint as compared to the first version of FoodForce and is aimed at both XOs and Windows.

Link to Download Page: http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/downloads/list

Relevant Files :

1. FoodForce.xo : For installing on olpc.
   
2. FoodForce for windows.ip : For installing in Windows. Unzip and run Foodforce2.exe to play the game.
   
3. src.zip : To view the source files.
   

Link to Wiki Page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/foodforce2

Please play the game and give us the feedback, there are still a lot of areas where we can improve. We will appreciate any kind of feedback, help and criticism and words of appreciation.

I will be updating the blog regularly with more news regarding the game.

Bibliographic Reference Parsing

Every research is done on the basis of some other previous research, and our scientists are scrupulous enough to acknowledge others work. So, every research paper contains some reference section, which refers to the previous work. But unfortunately, it is not computer-readable, since not every reference section is in the same format as others. There are many conventions as to how to cite other people's work in your paper, but we can never reach a stage that it is computer readable without any pre-processing.

Thus, there are projects like Google Scholar, ParaCite, CiteBase doing this work for us. But they are not perfect, neither is Plazi. The aim of Plazi is:

"Plazi is an association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature."

My aim is to identify the references and then parse them from a research paper and get out fields like Author Name, Year, Title and Publication. Thus, with this information in hand, we can then save it in our database and create Digital identifiers for the same. The project is useful to Plazi, thus I get to work on it for the summers.

So what I have been doing till now:

1. I have been writing lots of small codes to test things, to get data, to get training data etc.
   
2. Understanding the huge codebase of ParaCite and then finding out that it is not something we can build upon.
   
3. Starting out from scratch for our project.
   

   
   

The thing with most of the zoological papers is that they are not structured in the same sense as some of the modern scientific papers are; some are archaic, and they do not follow a very easy to computerize format. Another challenge that we face is that of micro-citation i.e. they often do not contain the name of the publication in full but in abbreviated format, which often end with the same separators that are used to separate various fields of a reference. Thus, we cannot follow some of the common approaches followed by conventional projects like ParaCite .

So, we have been using some conventional but effective approaches to do the job like finding out publications from a set of publications, learning from that data and making predictions for the ones I cannot find.

The project is challenging and interesting, will post more updates later on, and would like to hear views on it in comments.