 | Genetic algorithm placing 50 polygons to represent the Mona Lisa I'm a fan of genetic algorithms... I'd have loved to see this one with triangles instead of n-polygons, though. This image is early in the evolution, the final image is a good approximation. ;) |
 | Reset A fun, short, game. Cool novelty: the gameplay is synchronized with the music. Friend Adrienne Walker pointed out that this could be a great game jam theme. |
 | Google Native Client A plugin recently revealed by Google. Cross browser, runs sand boxed native code. Could be a good alternative to ActiveX. |
A university created webpage packed full of training videos, tutorials, and resources related to the product I work on.
 | WinDirStat I recently gave up on SpaceMonger -- it was having issues with lots of files. This survey convinced me to move over to WinDirStat, which works very well. |
 | Mr EditGotoFindCombo Nice tip for Visual Studio programmers: Quickly open files with sub-string prefix matching: CTRL-D, type:">of ", then start your file name. More tips on the linked page. |
Gah, lost a big comment.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the gist was that the mona lisa thing is lame. I was taken in at first too, but it's not really genetic, just a randomized hill climbing optimization. Randomly perturb your state -- see if things got better, if not try another random step. Pretty close to the worst way to optimize given that you have so much information available waiting to be extracted from the image.
If anything is neat it's that the worst possible algorithm still can get some decent output if you wait long enough.
WinDirStat rules so much it's not funny. Thanks for spreading the word; I've been passing it on to people for years at Autodesk.
ReplyDeleteTwo other free utilities of note: MWSnap is a pretty good image capture utility - I turn off the hotkeys, however. Xenu tells you which links on your webpages are dead. But, really, WinDirStat is just the best; make sure to click and hover on everything in the view, it's all quite interactive.