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
Recently I am being assigned to work on a FSM based workflow system to enable my other colleagues to use it in their application. I am rather impressed with the simplicity of the workflow system (initially designed by my Technical Director) and decided to post some notes here. The workflow system was developed for CodeIgniter PHP framework and Drupal CMS.
The Internet Censorship Dashboard is a project that aggregates data fetched from the OONI API, to provide an overview of the current state of Internet Censorship experienced by users mainly in Southeast Asia. The current form was built a couple of years ago, and recently got funded to get it updated to work better with new APIs.
(more…)I came across a video on Youtube on Pi day. Coincidently it was about estimating the value of Pi produced by Matt Parker aka standupmaths. While I am not quite interested in knowing the best way to estimate Pi, I am quite interested in the algorithm he showed in the video however. Specifically, I am interested to find out how easy it is to implement in Python.
Recently the term “Semantic Web” becomes extremely popular that Sitepoint blogs keep posting articles on this topic (1, 2). In my college days, I learned about Semantic Network and I wonder if there is some relationship between them. I’m not sure whether I get the concept correctly but in this article I would like to revise a bit on semantic network before going to semantic web. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
So I first heard about Panda probably a year ago when I was in my previous job. It looked nice, but I didn’t really get the chance to use it. So practically it is a library that makes data looks like a mix of relational database table and excel sheet. It is easy to do query with it, and provides a way to process it fast if you know how to do it properly (no, I don’t, so I cheated).