Archive for February, 2012

challenge problem for the evening: generate palindromes!

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

What’s the longest palindrome you can produce entirely out of words in
/usr/share/dict/words ? (or some other finite word list?)

– Spaces don’t count; the string, minus spaces and punctuation, has to
be a palindrome.
– Don’t use the same word more than once.
– Bonus points for constructing something syntactically valid-ish, but
that seems hard.

Something of a classic; I guess I was thinking about Peter Norvig.

Lua / Reaction-Diffusion Hack

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Rob:
– prototyping an iPad game with Codea
– going to Austin this weekend
Mark:
– implementing Reaction-Diffusion Model with Interacting Turing Modes
– – videos of the results

ENIAC Birthday Hack

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Erik
– adding Solr (full-text search) to network event monitoring code
– Rhobbler is hobbled by an incomplete JSON API (Graham, do you know anyone we can contact at Rhapsody?)
Mark
– minimum cost matching between instantiations of a shape grammar
– fixed Corkbird bitrot
– created a customized version of Corkbird for designing swimming creatures

(Mr. ENIAC is 65 years-old today.)