No Free Lunch (NFL)

My friend Indranil introduced me to the theory of “No Free Lunch”.  From Wikipedia article:

A conventional, but not entirely accurate, interpretation of the NFL results is that “a general-purpose universal optimization strategy is theoretically impossible, and the only way one strategy can outperform another is if it is specialized to the specific problem under consideration”

 

It is definitely something that I must keep in mind whenever doing research.

OpenCV

Well, I am learning OpenCV for my Advanced AI project.  I was never that into computer vision stuff, but its something new and might come in handy someday.

I got my eclipse environment set up and ran their sample app.  (I had to use -L/usr/lib not /usr/local/lib like they say)  Now am going to go through some of the simple core examples so that I can get an idea of how opencv works.

Xp-Dev web app

I made a php app to automate the task of creating group projects on xp-dev.  As a GTA for CS321, I had to create 70 accounts, around 16 projects and then add the students to their project!  That is a lot of clicking if you do it manually.  So, I made a php web app that utilizes Xp-Dev’s web api to do the work for me :).  Their api is very easy to use.  However, in order to use the code you must generate a developer api key and then request, through xp-dev’s ticket system, permission to add sub accounts.  Then all you need to do is put the names of the projects in one file and the email addresses of the group members with a blank line between project group in another.  Then run the app and voila all done :).