• Aug 27, 2003

  Free Classics eBooks

  From Bharani's Blog: Planet PDF is offering free PDF eBooks of classics including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick, The War of the Worlds, Pride and Prejudice, and quite a number more - none of which I've read, except for Alice in Wonderland.

  Not much of a classics person - give me Dragonlance, David Eddings, Raymond E. Feist anytime.

• Aug 24, 2003

  Nature's flawed programming

  I came upon this interesting tidbit in my Artificial Intelligence readings.

  A sphex (a kind of wasp) will, in the process of building a nest, dig a burrow, find an insect and sting it, drag it to the burrow, enter the burrow again to inspect the nest, drag the insect inside, and lay its eggs. That, as we shall soon see, is the sphex's built-in program for constructing a nest.

  If someone (an experimenter, or some nosy kid) picks up the paralyzed insect and moves it a few inches away, the sphex's program gets reset. The sphex now drags the insect to the burrow, and is compelled to re-enter the burrow to inspect the nest _again_, even though it has just checked. It does this even if the insect is moved away repeatedly, without the sphex ever realizing what is going on. The sphex is unable to learn that it's program is failing, and will not change it.

  "... the beetle continues on and pantomimes plugging the nest with the nonexistent ball of dung!"

  Even more amusing is the dung beetle, which goes off to fetch a ball of dung to plug its nest entrance. If the ball of dung is removed from its grasp _en route_, the beetle continues on and pantomimes plugging the nest with the nonexistent ball of dung! Nature (or evolution, depending on your opinion) has built in a pretty rigid program into the beetle's behavior.

  It is interesting to discover lifeforms as large as a sphex or dung beetle that don't have the capability of learning, of going beyond its genetically programmed behavior. Makes the _Home Sapiens_ and the thinking species (dolphins, whales, primates) all the more intriguing.

• Aug 21, 2003

  Dealing with colors

  Several tools to help the web developer in color scheming and color management.

  • Iconico's Color Picker is a free Windows application that helps you pick colors and save them to your swatch. Very good for picking colors from sites and pictures. My only grouse is that it doesn't allow you to save your swatch.
  • Color Schemer helps to create a color scheme when given a particular color. The resulting schemes don't always work though.
  • Color Blender does as its name suggests - it blends 2 colors into 1. The results can surprise you - you may just find your new favorite color with some experimentation.
  • ColorChip is a PHP class that, given a single color, produces the complementary color, nearby hues, a light to dark version of the color, and more. You have to try it to be impressed.
• Aug 21, 2003

  Genetic Algorithms links 2

  More GA links. For archival purposes.

  • ai-junkie is a great website with a GA tutorial written "in plain English".
  • Evolutionary Computation lecture notes by Thorsten Schnier.
  • More Evolutionary Computation lecture notes by Riccardo Poli, including a section on Classifier Systems.
  • Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms: Principles, Methods and Algorithms is an introduction to Evolutionary and Genetic Algorithms.
  • A GA tutorial with example applets.
  • The MAGDON Documentation has a brief introduction to GA, including descriptions of the Pittsburg approach and the Michigan approach.
  • GA-Search - the Genetic Algorithms search engine, is a search engine dedicated to only GA-related sites.
  • The American Association for Artificial Intelligence "is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines."
  • The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is an electronic journal on AI.
  • EvoWeb, the website of Evonet (European Network of Excellence in Evolutionary Computing), is a portal site for Evolutionary Computing.
  • The International Society of Artificial Life publishes the Artificial Life journal.
• Aug 21, 2003

  DHTML Lemmings

  This is nostalgic - DHTML Lemmings. I still haven't figured out how he did it (he says it's "all written in JavaScript" - pretty amazing!), but it plays just like the classic Lemmings.

  Two thumbs up, for the spectacular use of JavaScript, and also just because it's Lemmings.

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