Nature by Numbers - A short movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature.
I recommend watching in high-def and full-screen via the above link.
See the theory page for more information on the math that inspired this video.
A search for meaning within a game within a game. This 20 minute film by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman gets meta faster than you can say eXistenZ. ;)
A Pattern Language for Online Community Design
The principles of Christopher Alexander’s classic book on the use of patterns in architecture applied to the architecture of online social spaces.
Mr. Alexander’s ideas are also influential in the world of object-oriented programming.
Industrial Precision - How Ball Bearings Are Made
Ribbon Hero
If an activity can be learned;
if the player’s performance can be measured;
if the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion;
then that activity can be turned into a game.
via: Lost Garden ✈ Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game
Pomplamoose VideoSongs have two rules:
- What you see is what you hear, and
- If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
Some nice songs:
- Hail Mary
- Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) - Beyonce
- My Favorite Things - Sound of Music
- If You Think You Need Some Lovin
[via]
Mobile Development
This weekend I’ll be exploring:
- PhoneGap - Cross-platform mobile app-dev using html / css / javascript.
- JQTouch - A mobile plugin for my fav Javascript framework, JQuery.
- iProcessing - The API from processing.js extended for mobile use.
- MobiOne - Windows mobile emulator for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Pre.
Step one: Install Eclipse, PhoneGap and the Android SDK along with JQTouch, iProcessing and MobiOne.
Step two: Play around. Create a few sample apps.
Step Three: Tomorrow Andrew and I will deploy these apps to his Android phone.
You Know Who "Gets it"?
The Hypemachine, Groveshark and SoundCloud understand that the future will be streamed.
You can listen to (in their entirety) every album of the Hypem top 50 of 2009. The top 50 was crowd-sourced from the top 10 lists of over 500 bloggers. The albums are hosted by Groveshark.
Yes, the Hypem leaderboard gets gamed now and then, and it sometimes get clogged with meme-ooze, but the web’s messy like that.
SoundCloud is a mix-hunters paradise. I’m listening to Dj Czech’s “Bucket Of Grease” mix right now.
Waterloo / Google AI-Tron Challenge Results
The goal of this challenge was to write a computer-program capable of playing the game Tron.
The rankings for my Ruby bot:
- 146 / 708 Total Entries
- 3 / 23 Ruby Entries
- 16 / 88 Canadian Entries
The rankings were determined using tournament play along with the Elo rating system.
Early non-minmax versions of my bots are available on github. The winning C++ bot source is also available; as is a brief explanation by the author.
I enjoyed this challenge immensely. My Ruby programming skills also benefited from this Code Kata.
Update: A detailed examination of the winning bot. And if you’re brave, a Haskell bot explained. ;)
Also: The tron battle continues on dhartmei’s server.
The future of games, a talk by Jesse Schell. [28 minutes]
Even if you’re not a gamer this is a must-watch video, especially the second half on the implications of “games that break through the reality barrier” and the attention economy. I’m not sure I welcome the “gameification” of life, but it does feel like the inevitable progression of the capitalist spectacle. “A world where points are distributed for paying attention — to ads, activities, or other people.”
Adding to the conversation:
- Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
- Achievement Porn
One human, three machines, rhythm. Also: How it works.
Instructables Restaurant
Amsterdam is now home to the world’s first open source restaurant. Everything you see, use and eat is downloaded from Instructables.com.
It’s an experiment in combining free culture with food concepts.
From May 2010 DC Covers in Three Sentences or Less.
Also: Batgirl
Forget crop circles, Sierpinski snow-triangles are the new hotness.
iProcessing is an open programming framework for native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for the iPhone.
This video shows two AI players battling it out for Tron supremacy as part of the Google AI Challenge.
If you’ve ever wanted to learn about game-AI programming you might want to look into this challenge. Bots can be written in C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, C#, Javascript, Go, Scheme, Lua and Clojure.
If you don’t know where to begin, you can try your hand at learning game-AI by playing Ruby Warrior, a roguelike that you play by implementing a Ruby class containing your player’s control logic.
From Fish to Infinity
The first of a series of columns by Steven Strogatz on mathematics “from pre-school to grad school”.
“The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.”
[via: dad]
Media: Photoshop / Custom Processing sketch.
I cannot remember the source of the ladybug. It was part of a free sprite library created by an indie-game developer.