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
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.
The Sports Tracker app for my awesome Nokia N9 is not receiving any updates and doesn’t look like things are going to change any time soon. Recently the development team at Sports Tracker published a status update post and sadly there’s no mention of N9 port at all. It’s really sad considering how incomplete the N9 port is at the moment (horrible GPS positioning, no pedometer to name a few).
After publishing the previous note on setting up my development environment, I find myself spending more time in the CLI (usually via SSH from host). Then I find myself not needing all the GUI apps in a standard Ubuntu desktop environment so I went ahead and set up a new environment based on Ubuntu Quantal server edition beta-1. For some reason my network stopped working and didn’t really want to spend time finding out the cause, so I reinstalled everything again today using the final installer, as well as the updated Virtualbox 4.2.6.
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.
It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.