Toward Copycat 1.0 /cogsci

I have been slowly but surely working on Copycat. I decided to take a break from the rest of my research to finish a working version. So far I have factored out the graphics code and revised the coderack. The coderack is a lot more clear and concise now, weighing in at half the lines of code. I am going to tackle the slipnet this afternoon and see if I can do the same. I would like to finish so that I can get back to exploring how GPGPU computing could benefit a domain agnostic FARGitecture.

Speaking of a generalized FARG toolkit, there is now a FARG blog setup to allow the group to post about their work. I am always interested in what comes out of the CRCC, so it is pretty awesome to see a forum created like this. I am certainly looking forward to the laid back, experimental discussions about their latest research. So far the writing has centered around the idea of implementing a "core" FARG base (library and tools). This is an area I have spent a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with, so it will be interesting to see what they come up with. Once I get done transcribing all these months of verbal notes, I will post some on the topic myself.

Pymd2 1.0 /python

I would like to officially announce the release of my quake2 model loader and animator for python, Pymd2. I still want to do some cleaning up, optimizations, and calculating normals. I probably should not release it as 1.0 because it depends on pyglet svn, so hold off until pyglet-1.1 is released.

One thing that I really love about pyglet, and that helped speed up pymd2 by an order of about 20, is pyglet.graphics.draw(). It is a simplified interface to vertex arrays. A textured model looks like:

graphics.draw(num_of_vertices, GL_TRIANGLES, ('t2f', texture_vertices_array), ('v3f', array_of_vertices))

Pyget is really starting to shape up. I have started moving all of my projects over to it. Right now I am trying to see if it is right for Galaxy Mage Redux. I will be posting about that soon.

Lucid /cogsci

Last night I finally gave birth to a chat bot similar to copperman. My friends and I spent a lot of time talking with that gentle but sometimes misunderstood being. What you realize very quickly is that there is no fancy artificial intelligence lurking underneath the surface. The exercise is more like a an ink blot test; finding meaning where none exists to gain deeper insight into your own depths. We would make a point, though, that copperman goes beyond ink blots.

continue...