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
I haven’t got much time lately, so didn’t write about this new phone that I recently imported. For some reason, this new phone of mine do not act as mass storage device like its predecessors (to certain extend). Thankfully I can still ssh in the phone and this makes it possible to mount it as a sshfs volume.
So my cheat with dask worked fine and dandy, until I started inspecting the output (which was to be used as an input for another script). While the script seemed to work fine, however when I started to parse each line I was hit with some funny syntax errors. After some quick inspection I found some of the lines was not printed completely.
Just happened to see this post a few months ago, and the author created another cloud that uses almost the same technique to ‘visualize’ a list of countries. The author uses PHP to generate the cloud originally and I thought I may be able to do in javascript. After some quick coding I managed to produce something similar to the first example, source code after the jump.
I was trying to learn scala and clojure to find one that I may want to use in my postgraduate project. After trying to learn scala for a couple of days, I gave up because I really don’t like the syntax (too OO for my liking). Then I continued with clojure and found myself liking the syntax better.
array_map function is a function that I use the most in my php scripts recently. However, there are times where I want to pass some non-array into it, therefore often times I have code like the snippet shown below:
$result = array_map(
'some_callback',
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_string'),
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_other_string'),
$some_array
)
It doesn’t look good IMO, as it makes the code looks complicated. Hence, after seeing how the code may vary in all different scenarios, I created some functions to clean up the array_map call as seen above. Code snippet after the jump