Notes on codes, projects and everything
We were asked to develop a program that demonstrate Artificial Intelligence and apply what we had learned in class into the program. Then we came out with an idea to develop a program that is able to do tarot reading. At first the program did not have a GUI and is operated through Swi-Prolog interpreter but in the end we included a GUI-frontend for the program using XPCE.
First the program will require 3 random numbers from the user, then a random number will be generated as the seed. Then the card will be “shuffled” (in fact, we did some calculations to the user provided random numbers) and then determine the orientation of the card (normal and reversed). Then, we use the computed number to pick a tarot card and get the reading based on the orientation.
To shuffle the cards, we use a random number and place the random number into the formula such that $$c=x^y\text{ mod }23$$ where c is the corresponding card number, x is the user provided number and y is the system generated random number. Then the orientation of the card is determine by calculating the mod 2 of the random number.
To implement simple search strategy, we used a hash function to divide the total of 22 major arcana cards into 5 groups. Each group will have one individual database file storing the card characteristics and reading. Then, depending on the calculated number, the system will choose to query which database file to decrease the inclusion of database files. We may not be able to observe the performance enhancement as we only have 5 database files but it should be more obvious for system with more database files.
I am the developer for the GUI front-end. At first we planned to write the GUI using other languages/platforms but because of the time constraint we decided to give up on GUI front-end. However, I managed to pick up basic XPCE GUI construction just in time and made a GUI for the program. However, the GUI is not very friendly and is not able to display images. Because XPCE is a multi-platform supported toolkit therefore the appearance of the GUI is consistent in various supported operating system.
The program is reading input through prolog interpreter.
The program displays the result after computing the input.
The program is reading input through GUI
The program displays the result through the GUI
Just managed to migrate all my blog sites to one centralized multi-site, so no more half-baked solution and hopefully this brings better plugin compatibility. I have not check with other related services (like Google Webmaster Tools) whether this cause any breakage though. Well, the main purpose of this blog post is actually a draft of what I did for the past two months for my postgraduate programme. Yea, I should have posted more stuff to this blog (just realized that my last post here is already like half a year ago).
Ever wanted to find the number of days between two dates without counting weekend (Saturdays and Sundays)? In PHP you typically needs to do a lot of calculation and a lot of factors needs to be considered. Therefore, in the end you will end up having a whole bunch of code that you will probably start asking yourself whether you are programming a web-calendar or something similar.
This post is purely based on my own speculation as there’s no experiment on real-life data to actually back the arguments. I am currently trying to document down a plan for my experiment(s) on recommender system (this reminds me that I have not release the Flickr data collection tool :/) and my supervisor advised to write a paragraph or two on some of the key things. Since he is not going to read it, so I might as well just post it here as a note.
A friend of mine recently posted a screenshot containing a code snippet for a fairly straight forward problem. So after reading the solution I suddenly had the itch to propose another solution that I initially thought would be better (SPOILER: Turns out it isn’t). Then mysteriously I stuck myself to my seat and started coding an alternative solution to it instead of playing Diablo 3 just now.
Implementing a Information Retrieval system is a fun thing to do. However, doing it efficiently is not (at least to me). So my first few attempts didn’t really end well (mostly uses just Go/golang with some bash tricks here and there, with or without a database). Then I jumped back to Python, which I am more familiar with and was very surprised with all the options available. So I started with Pandas and Scikit-learn combo.