Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Artifice and Intelligence

Fun video of the day: ABB FlexPicker Robots (Youtube)

In other news, I recently discovered Façade, an experiment in virtual storytelling which bills itself as "a one act interactive drama." Essentially, Façade is a game set in a basic 3D environment; however, interaction in Façade occurs mainly through the keyboard, not the 3D environment, with players typing messages in English to the two computer-controlled characters.

As with most games that rely on natural language processing, Façade really doesn't actually do a very good job of understanding the typed messages. The interesting thing about Façade though, is that thanks to the setup (you're stuck between a feuding couple) it doesn't really matter what you think, but your inflections still affect the story. So all in all, it's really well done from an interactive fiction point of view, although it's completely irrelevant to the language processing stuff I was looking into when I found it.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Five Down, Zero to Go

Exams are over! Let life begin anew.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Creature Design

The lack of pretty pictures on this blog is disturbing me. I'm therefore breaking from the exam twitter theme to upload some old sketches.

It sort of makes you want to sing "Circle of Life", doesn't it?

...and back to studying.

Augh! My exam just crashed!

Take-home exams and me do not get along.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

1 down 20 left

I just finished a linear systems and signals problem without looking at the solution: feeling pretty good about life.

Exam Time

In honor of the exam period, all posts for the next 1.5 weeks will be twitter-sized.