N-Queens

n-queens problem is a very interesting problem.  Especially when you start imagining more than 2 dimensions and start thinking d-dimensions it becomes an even more interesting and challenging combinatorics problem.  The link also points to some applications including traffic control, which makes sense.

Chocolatey (package manager)

Chocolatey is a package manager for windows.  This is something that I think all windows users should consider getting.  Even if you don’t use the command line there is a GUI to interact with it https://chocolatey.org/packages/ChocolateyGUI.  You can add new packages to chocolatey.org and take advantage of their automatic packages to make it so if you update the package the users that have it installed will automatically be updated.  Awesome.  So, if I ever have to manage a bunch of computers I think this is the first thing I’ll install on all the windows machines.

Would be nice to have program that would connect to all of the chocolatey computers and ask them for the packages that chocolatey is managing and also request that particular packages be installed on those machines.  This would make chocolatey perfect.

https://puppetlabs.com/ does that!  And its open source http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-open-source (at least for the non-enterprise version).  However, there are a bunch of alternatives http://alternativeto.net/software/puppet/.  Which is cool.  Might be a better/easier/free alternative.

Quals

I passed both my Foundations and my AI qual.  I had to appeal for a rescore for my AI qual because the original grade showed that I failed.  Thankfully the regrade was accepted and I passed with the new score.

Now I passed all 4 of my exams: Foundations, AI, Compilers and Software Construction.  I believe I only have 2 more classes after this semester before I move on to having only to work on research.  I have a decent start with a thesis topic, Bounties.  Praise God.

Multi-team Systems

A multi team system consists of multiple teams where each team may have their own goals, but system in general has a common ultimate goal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiteam_system.  This is really interesting.  I think that this would be an interesting direction to move bounties.

Also, on a different note, I think that a survey of this field would be useful.  Especially since I think those in the multiagent community should start to think in this manner.  I did some googling and I thought for sure that the robocup rescue simulation league would have some research on this topic.

As always I have to go back over my posts and it seems like I had an idea for multi-teams but in terms of fuzzy sets.  https://drewsblog.herokuapp.com/?p=1621.

Codebox

I found out about https://www.codebox.io/.  It is an online ide and it supports a ton of langs (including java).  It is open source, so you don’t have to use their services.  It also has desktop apps so you can work outside your browser.  The ide is customizable and you can make custom plugins etc.  Sounds awesome considering it is a two person company (a frontend and a backend dev).  I should see about setting it up.  I’ll probably try it out on their servers and if I really like it I’ll see about setting it up on my server.

Car insurance data

Did you know that auto insurance companies allow you to look up a quote online.  All you need is your name, address and date of birth and they will show you your cars!  That means you can with a little effort find out what cars people have!  Year and Model at least.  That could be valuable info for sales or targeted advertisements.  The crazy thing is that the website does not require you to agree that you are who you filled in the box says you are!  So, technically I don’t think you would be doing anything illegal.  Crazy.

fun autonomous vehicle ideas

Would be cool in the future with autonomous cars we will be able to have events where instead of having stations in a building that you walk to you would be in cars.  And whenever you switched you would change cars.

 

Bathroom car!  Would be too cool to have an autonomous bus/car that just drove around the city and people could request it and you would be able to go to the bathroom in it.  It could connect to the back of your car and you could walk into it.  Sensors would be able to monitor when you needed to go to the bathroom so that those vehicles could be positioned appropriately.