Posts from around Teh Intarwebs hand-picked by robots
After publicizing the demo of Acuitas playing Allergic Cliffs, I hinted that I might release my “text adventure” version of Allergic Cliffs publicly. I’m happy to report that I have now done so! And while I was at it, I threw in a text version of the similar (but more elaborate) Stone Cold Caves puzzle. The…
This month I returned to the Text Parser after letting it be for almost a year. My focus was on nailing the final major feature that I needed to handle all the sentences in my three children’s book benchmarks: “parenthentical noun phrases.” I don’t know if that’s the technical term, but that’s what I’m calling…
Since getting my custom pump to work well earlier this year, I’ve been pushing ahead on hydraulic actuator designs. There isn’t a lot of miniature hydraulic equipment available for hobbyists, at least not at a good price, so I’m trying to make my own. I’ve settled on inflatable bladders as a fruitful direction to investigate…
It’s ready! Acuitas can play the text version of Allergic Cliffs and is often able to determine one of the secret rules by which the cliffs operate. Watch the video watch the video In a previous blog I discussed how Acuitas chooses moves based on a simple heuristic that tries to replicate successes and avoid repeating failures….
It’s about time I blog about ACE (Ambulatory Canine Emulator). This project got neglected while I focused on completing Atronach and getting started with hydraulics, but I’ve been poking at it every now and then. My most recent conclusion is that I do, in fact, need to replace the PF35T-48 motors. Those bargain-basement unipolar steppers…
This month I continued work on trial-and-error learning for playing Allergic Cliffs. If you haven’t read my introduction to this Acuitas sub-project and the subsequent progress report, I recommend taking a look at those. What I’ve done since has been debugging and enhancing the “feedback-informed actions” and “rule formation” features discussed in the progress report,…
I’ve been wanting to add some kind of physics experiment to my rotation of hobby projects, and I think I’ve picked one out. But I don’t want to go into that just yet, because I’ll be concentrating on the equipment prerequisites first. The most interesting thing I’ll need is a way to measure tiny amounts…
My short story of the above title will be LIVE and free to read in the 3rd Quarter 2025 issue of Abyss & Apex tomorrow! It’s about a professional curse-remover who gets in a little over her head on an unconventional case; it’s got mystery, magic, barbarians, and something to say about the consequences when…
This month I have a quick demo for you, showcasing Acuitas’ upgraded semantic memory visualization. My goal for this was always to “show him thinking” as it were, and I think I’ve finally gotten there. Nodes (concepts) and links (relationships between concepts) are shown as dots and lines in a graph structure. Whenever any process…
A couple months ago I described my plans to implement trial-and-error learning so Acuitas can play a hidden information game. This month I’ve taken the first steps. I’m moving slowly, because I’ve also had a lot of code cleanup and fixing of old bugs to do – but I at least got the process of…