Så var vår kjære leilighet lagt ut på finn.no, så kjenner du noen som trenger leilighet i Oslo, så send dem linken under:

http://www.finn.no/finn/realestate/object?finnkode=20447011

Trenger et ekstra soverom…

1. Ullundertøy
2. Lue (jeg fryser)
3. Håndstøvsuger
4. DAB/Internettradio til kjøkkenbenken
5. Single malt (helst noe med litt røyksmak)

During playtime at work, I ported the Melephant chess Qt designer plugin (used in 0.1) to run on an ARM-based device, and a collegue played it, killing it in 15 moves. Since the processor was quite a bit slower than the intel CPUs I originally developed it for, the AI could only do 3 ply (look 3 moves ahead), which was the same as “novice” in v 0.1. Personally I suck at chess and occationally loose in novice mode …but it showed that it needed to be faster!

So I had to make 0.2, adding:

Code optimisations – profiling the code in valgrind resulted in several code optimisations, including rewriting the container for pieces on the board and caching the king position, as it is checked often, searching the array for it was actually a bottle neck.

Improved AI - To be honest, most time was spent on code optimisation, but the AI also got quiescence searching, implemented so we never stop searching on capturing moves. Iterative deepening was added to allow more efficient alpha beta pruning.

Also added an application icon that looks like crap that you can put on your desktop, and better piece selection so it works well with cursor keys. Another AI level was unlocked – “Easy Plus” – try to beat it … I can’t (but then again I suck at chess, maybe I’ll manage before 0.3).

Download the executable for Windows HERE: MElephant-0.2.3.zip.

If there is demand for it, I can upload a Linux/Mac version, after all I did develop it on Linux mostly.

Var på ferie i London hvor vi tok endel bilder, dessverre lånte en full dame kameraet og formatterte minnekortet. Søkte litt rundt på nettet og prøvde noen freeware-programmer for Vista (ja uff…), kom over dette kjekke programmet og det fikk ut alle bildene igjen! Helt gratis! Wohoo! Og her sitter vi i Hyde park:

Afternoon tea i Hyde park

Endelig noen som har skjønt det … å kjøpe flaskevann for 20 kr flaska når man, i alle fall her i Norge, kan fylle flaska med like bra eller bedre vann fra springen er galskap! Slutt!

Started writing an Chinese elephant chess game, ended up with a normal chess game, well, here is a snapshot of it: MElephant-0.1b.zip. It’s ofcourse in pre-beta, but seems quite stable while playing. Tell me what you think? I sometimes even have a problem beating it at easy, though it seems to be a bit eager to stalemate itself… I can probably make a mac and linux version too due to the use of the LGPLed Qt 4.5 for the tiny UI for it, and boost for the rest (including the written from scratch ai library and rules-library). It uses simple alpha-beta pruned minimax for the searching for now.

I will make it play Xiang qi aswell soon I think, it was designed to be able to do both.

Have fun

Slashdot today had a cool entry on real walking in virtual reality.  Looks like an important component of the upcoming holodeck I’ll have in the basement of the house we might buy one day… they had hidden a video on the site (http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/):

http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/img/Media/CyberCarpet.mpg

More videos of the thing available here (warning site in Germlish):

http://www.amm.mw.tum.de/index.php?id=250

It’s just a shame it’s so big…

Apparently not much…

10 Writing code to pay for beer and unhealthy food

15 Eating unhealthy food and drinking beer

20 Going to the gym to get rid of the beer belly

30 sleep

40 GOTO 10 Read the rest of this entry »

我的普通话不用 ：-）

I will try to do some chinese blogging from now. Todays word:

网络日记 = wang3luo4 ri4ji4 which means network diary or blog.