Thoughts on Humor

I wonder if humor is universal?  If all languages have a form of humor.  I know some languages only have rudimentary term for quantity or numbers.  So, do they have humor?

Humor doesn’t seem like something that would need to be present in a language.  Programming languages certainly don’t.  However, you can’t have a conversation in a programming language that wouldn’t be funny.

So, I think that humor may be universal in humans.  Although what is funny in one language is probably not funny in another.  Although probably the experience of laughing is universally humanly possible.

At the end of page 43 of Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly  they state that chimpanzees are even known to laugh, specifically when playing and general horsing around.  However, the book then proceeds to cite that humor developed in humans to relieve emotional trauma or stress.  Actually none of the references claim that humor developed out of joy (which I find rather humorous).  And then afterwords was used as a mechanism to relieve stress.

That book also notes studies on the brain that identified regions that are responsible for understanding and producing humor.  Which is very interesting.  We actually have a section of the brain dedicated to humor.  We were built to communicate in ways that bring joy and laughter to others.  Or as those at the end of page 43 would have you believe to reduce each others stress.  I’m not saying they are wrong that humor does have that effect, I’m just claiming its not the basis for humor’s development.

Well this post certainly was longer than I originally thought it was going to be.  It was just a random thought I had.  Turned out to be rather interesting.  I wonder what humor will look like between AIs.  If it was up to those at the end of 43 they probably wouldn’t have humor since they don’t experience stress/trauma :).

 

Microgrid thoughts

There are numereous hurdles to get through before we start seeing microgrid electricity economies.

The first which has already been dealt with by http://www.homerenergy.com is a microgrid simulator that simulates and suggests solutions to the first problem of determining number and type of alternative energy resources are needed for an area.

Then we need to be able to optimize the use of the resources.  This could be framed as an integer optimization problem, however the system is highly dynamic.  Accordingly, a more suitable although not optimal solution would be to use multiagent learning.

If multiagent systems or integer programming can produce a stable result, then the main problem is actually getting the macrogrid companies to start to create them.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/09/microgrid-economics-it-takes-a-village-a-university-and-a-ship above adapted from the link.

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.