More research is leading me to more funny moments while reading papers. In a paper that seeks to explain an optimization technique called the Conjugate Gradient Method, there is a page that is blank except for a brief listing of keywords associated with the paper’s topics:
Keywords: conjugate gradient method, preconditioning, convergence analysis, agonizing pain
Here is the paper, should you desire to torture yourself.
While doing research for the final paper for my Artificial Intelligence course, I came across this citation in a paper I am studying:
In several applications, Tang and Fishwich [22] … and many other researchers have shown that ANNs perform better than
ARIMA models, specifically, for more irregular series and for multiple-period-ahead forecasting.
…
[22] Z. Tang and P. A. Fishwich, “Backpropagation neural nets as models for time series forecasting,” ORSA Journal on
Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp 374-385, 1993.
Tang and Fishwich. What an awesome name that would be for a new Adult Swim cartoon.
Many thanks to Jeff Hudson for emailing me about some errors that I had in the Zodiac cipher web toy. I’ve made the corrections, and I’ve also posted a few more interesting decodings that I found recently. These decodings are almost certainly gibberish, but they are still kind of fun to find.
Jeff says:
I’ve only just started trying to decode the 340, but the other day i found “crush them into ground up bits” in a single string of characters. I naturally got really excited as this phrase emerged – but unfortunately everything else in the code was complete gibberish 🙁 so i guess it’s back to the drawing board lol.
Get our your decoder rings and try out my Zodiac cipher web toy. Crack the code; become instantly famous!
This cipher is one of the famous unsolved ciphers that the Zodiac serial killer sent to newspapers back in the late 1960s / early 1970s to taunt people about his killings. His first cipher was solved a long time ago. But he sent another cipher, which remains unsolved to this day. Many cryptography experts have tried and failed, which has led to speculation that the cipher is a hoax sent to frustrate and delay detectives working the case. But there are claims that by using statistical analysis, you can tell that the cipher does indeed contain a message (I don’t recall exactly how).
Slide.com has a nifty and free slideshow-creation widget. Check out this slideshow that uses my Flickr photostream –
Here’s a a larger 800×600 version. It looks nicer!
I had to sign a form tonight that has this legalese about permissions I’m granting to ACM by submitting my abstract to an evolutionary computing conference. Maybe I’m not around legal-speak enough to think that using the term ‘universe’ this seriously is not at all strange:
Here is the latest toy that I made for my AI course:
Shiny Four is a Connect Four implementation, using a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning, written in JavaScript. The JavaScript makes it quite slow and inefficient. But it works. Kinda. If you play against the computer, it will take a few moments (5 to 10 seconds on my machine) for it to make its move. Try to beat the coldhearted machine!
I’ve had nothing interesting to post recently. The best I can offer at the moment is this strange statute I found in the LAW table of the Kentucky state legal case management system we’ve been working on:
ACQUIRING CONTROL OVER ANIMAL FACILITY W/O CONSENT
Interestingly, it is only a misdemeanor. And I’m not sure what the advantage is to gaining control of an animal facility. It doesn’t have nearly the same appeal as train robbing. Stealing a train FULL of animals, on the other hand… maybe THAT’S a felony.
Another interesting related statute:
REFUSAL TO LEAVE ANIMAL FACILITY
“Seriously; get OUT already! NO; FOR THE LAST TIME — YOU CAN’T HAVE A PUPPY!!!”
The Artificial Intelligence course I’m taking now is turning out to be very interesting and fun. I gathered much geeky satisfaction from resurrecting (read: “stealing”) old Ultima IV graphics for a pathfinding project that I wrote as a web application:
Click here to play with it. It’s very JavaScript-heavy, so it needs a modern browser that doesn’t suck. It works in IE but prefers Firefox and Safari.