I recently picked up a good book about sailboats “Twenty Affordable Sailboats to Take You Anywhere” by Gregg Nestor containing specifications for each boat and simple calculations for safety and comfort. However, there are problems with the calculations. The motion comfort ratio for the Baba 30 caught my eye since it was so far off […]
01Feb
Neural Networks
Filed in Python Leave a comment
I’ve recently been working with neural networks and currently have a neural network class and a simple program to evolve the network weights. The class and a few methods are defined in NeuralFunctions.py. The function createRandomWeights is currently set up to create a 9 neuron network when test = True and a completely random network […]
19Jan
Highlife
Filed in Cellular Automata | Game of Life Leave a comment
In Conway’s Life the rules for the birth and death of cells are simple: 1. Any cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies 2. Any living cell with two or three living neighbors lives 3. Any living cell with more than three living neighbors dies 4. Any dead cell with exactly three living neighbors […]
12Jan
Fourier Life
Filed in Cellular Automata | Game of Life 1 Comment
As I mentioned in my post on Amazon’s web services one of the things I’ve been thinking about is a way to do analysis on the GOL universe to find interesting things even if I’m not watching. Poking around the web turned up Fourier Life which discusses an automated method of finding replicating structures in cellular […]
09Jan
Buttons
Filed in Python | Tkinter Leave a comment
While I was doing the profiling it became clear that a large part of the processing is devoted to just displaying images on the screen. Of course the graphical display is useful but there are times where I want to leave the program running for long periods of time and won’t be looking at it […]
24Dec
Hurry Up Part 2
Filed in Cellular Automata | Game of Life Leave a comment
In Part 1 I showed that a lot of time is spent in the gol_defs updateState function indexing the neighbors to see who’s alive and who’s dead. For a 500 cell x 500 cell grid run for 50 cycles this accounts for 35% of the execution time. So much time is spent in this one location […]
24Dec
Amazon Web Services
Filed in EC2 | Game of Life | Linux 1 Comment
As mentioned previously Amazon offers services used by a lot of companies to provide affordable, scalable computing power. That’s great if you’re making money from whatever you’re doing on those servers. I’m not. So, what caught my eye is the AWS free usage tier. This gives you 750 hours of computing time each month for […]
23Dec
Hurry up, someone is waiting on you for that
Filed in Cellular Automata Leave a comment
The title of this post is from a fortune cookie I received a few years ago. I keep it on my desk at work to remind me not to waste time. So what does this have to do with this blog? Well, now that I have a nice high resolution graphical display for my Game […]
19Dec
Game of Life Graphical Display
Filed in Cellular Automata | Game of Life Leave a comment
While the Game of Life ASCII display I talked about here is functional it’s limited and can’t show grids larger than a few dozen cells on a side. Fortunately Python has a standard module called Tkinter that allows for much better graphical displays. Using it requires a number of changes to the existing code but you get much nicer […]
08Dec
Game of Life
Filed in Cellular Automata | Game of Life 2 Comments
The Game of Life, created by John Conway in 1970, is probably the most well known cellular automata. Implemented on a grid it has a few very simple rules that are imposed at each cycle: 1. Any cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies 2. Any living cell with two or three living neighbors […]