Webpages 'n' Competitions 'n' Stuff

If I haven't been posting a lot lately it's because I've been giving the Waterloo iGEM team wiki a shiny new theme, mulling over the Intelligent Systems Challenge, and going to my actual job.

I don't have much else to report on, although the iGEM forums linked to a really cool story about oil drops which I'm shamelessly reposting here. This experiment is right up there with Millikan's famed oil drop experiment in terms of scientific oil experiments that utterly blow my mind.

When Auld Lang Something Something...

Happy New Year!

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.

Five Down, Zero to Go

Exams are over! Let life begin anew.

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.

1 down 20 left

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