BuschnicK

Action, Thrill, Supsense - and all without special effects.

For a couple of years now I have the outlines of a webgame design lying around. Working title "Operation Survival - humanities last stand". It's supposed to be a persistent multiplayer online game involving tactical fighting to defend the earth from alien invasion. It's a bit more involved, but I won't go into that right now. Anyways, I have been playing with various implementation ideas and wanted to show you one that ultimately got discarded.

The idea was to have an animated battle in space with two motherships facing each other and launching fighters/rockets/lasers at each other. Controls are indirect, with the player specifying target types (mothership or enemy fighters) and the AI duelling it out. Fighters have flocking behaviour to fly in formation.

The game design calls for something more "down to earth" so to speak, so while this prototype might eventually have become fun it's not suited for this particular game vision.

If you wanna play with it go here. Launch some fighters by clicking on the round brown mothership targetting icons in the lower left (the energy bars were meant as an auto retreat threshold - once a fighter's energy drops below that value it tries to escape back to the mothership). The white fighter type will follow your mousecursor around to test the flocking algorithm.

A collegue just twittered this.

...not my cup of tea. Never was, never will be. The latest cinematic installement proved again that good special effects alone don't make a good movie. It does feature nice to watch yet uninspired CGI (why does no one ever really play with zero gravity effects? Momentum in space? True three dimensional battle maneuvers? Distance and emptiness in space? anyway, different rant...), but the story, oh the story... It's so full of holes, unbearable gung ho macho dialogue and cheap chicken out plot devices like time travel and random technology gadgets it's almost insulting.

In my eyes a movie like StarShip Troopers is far more enjoyable: it features special effects on par, matches the macho dialogue with wits and most importantly doesn't take itself so damn seriously while managing to make a satiric statement at the same time. Or what the heck, watch Dark Star instead. I mean, what can be cooler than surfing into a sun?!

We went hiking on the Zugspitze 2 weeks ago. Richy put some fotos online here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Greadle/20090501Alpen?authkey=Gv1sRgCOm17tzJ-ITSYA#

We went through the Höllentalschlucht which was still officially closed due to large amounts of snow and ice and bridges still being taken out for the winter.

The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.

In the average home, a television set is turned on for more than a third of the day ? eight hours, 14 minutes, Nielsen said. That's an hour more than it was a decade ago. Most of that extra TV viewing is coming outside of prime time, where TVs are on only four minutes more than they were 10 years ago.

The average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day, Nielsen said.

One new Nielsen finding ? that young people aged 12 to 17 watched 3% more television during the season that ended in May than they had the previous year ? is a particular relief to TV network executives.

For a few years, Nielsen had been finding that TV viewing among teenagers was flat or even declining, a trend blamed on the Internet or the popularity of electronic games and other devices.

Numbers from 2006 - I can only assume it has gotten worse in the meantime. Ouch!

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-09-21-homes-tv_x.htm

Bored shephards... I don't believe it ;-)

Gott-sei-Dank scheinen wenigstens noch einige mit einem Rest gesunden Menschenverstandes übrig zu sein: maverecon. Meine persönliche Meinung geht etwas über "daft" hinaus. Man sollte die Verantwortlichen *censored* (mir wurde gesagt die Original Formulierung sei etwas zu krass gewesen). Eine derartig zynische, heuchlicherische, unferfrorene, schamlose, idiotische, kurzsichtige, populistische Maßnahme wie die Abwrackprämie hat es schon lange nicht mehr gegeben. Wie kann sich ein Politiker hinstellen und ernsthaft behaupten das diene dem Umweltschutz? Oder der Wirtschaft? Wenn Politiker sich wider besseren Wissens (hoffentlich!) zu so einem Scheiss hinreissen lassen zweifel ich doch an dem Nutzen der Demokratie. Populismus und Wahlkampf verbauen die Möglichkeit die richtigen Entscheidungen zu treffen. ouch!

I finally got around to uploading the tour data of my "Soulbiking 2004" bicycle trip through Europe. 20 countries, 15.000 kilometres, 82.000 metres elevation gain. I was quite satisfied to see how big it looks from outer space ;-)












Größere Kartenansicht

...and scary: Cherenkov Radiation, Nuclear Waste Storage Facility
photographed by Taryn Simon

Our latest baby is about to be released:

http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2009/03/diffing-x86-vs-arm-code.html

I'm a proud parent ;-)

It didn't actually take that long but still more than half an hour - on a defragmented drive - which is pretty weak I think. Apparently the explorer is catastrophically bad at dealing with lots of small files in a directory. Try selecting >= 100.000 files to get their combined size...

Another nice anti feature is the new and improved search. For one thing, despite the claims, the search indexer does degrade performance noticably while it's running in the background. But even worse: it gives false negatives! I.e. search for files or file contents will not give any results while I most defininitely know I have some files matching the search criteria. This makes search unusable.

Argh. The law of leaky abstractions at work. In a misguided attempt at making user's life easier Microsoft introduced aliases for "c:/program files" and other critical windows folders in Vista. This way localized versions of windows (e.g. "c:/programme" ) should be able to deal with badly written programs that have the install destination hardcoded and don't account for regional naming differences. It's an ugly hack to fix an ugly problem. However, the frickin fix doesn't even work. And when it fails it fails badly. I currently have a program I can neither uninstall nor reinstall (it's installer silently fails and rolls back). Worse: it isn't even possible to delete it manually. I can delete it from c:/programme but if I then copy a fresh install to the previous location I get a "cannot overwrite c:/program files/bla" error. Ok, try to do it with administrator privilidges in Safe mode: no deal! The fucking thing is undeletable.

Now the best thing is that the program we are talking about is Mozy - my backup solution. It installs a service, a shell extension and a file system monitor. Things that are often characteristic for malware. I had tried Microsoft OneCare as an antivirus solution some weeks ago and that decided to interfere with mozy. Now although I have long since uninstalled OneCare mozy is still crippled - hence my rant above. Even better - OneCare cannot simply be installed like any normal piece of software, no, it forces you to uninstall any other AntiVir solution you may have already had and to top it of: you actually need to download a removal tool (!!!) in order to get rid of it again. This is fucking ridiculous. If it wasn't for Visual Studio, which is great and which I am using on a daily basis, this would have been the final straw for my emigration to linux.

So fuck you Microsoft for providing me the disservice of this hidden "convenience" folder aliasing Anti-Feature.

I have started playing OGame a couple of days ago. Apparently it's one of the biggest browser games with around 2.000.000 players. It's a bit dull so far but maybe we can make it interesting - join me in universe 57. I'm already thinking of ways to automate it, a habit which got me kicked out of the last browser game I've tried - my AI was getting too good too fast and the admins took note ;-) Anyways, either we'll have fun playing or we start an AI war...

Closure

My brother's myspace page - check it out. Although I personally liked his English stuff better "Chef" and "sensuland" are very cool.

A friend just twittered about this: the world accessibility map. Data visualization at its finest ;-)



original source

I am sooo mad at frickin Windows Vista. From a usability perspective it has been a total downgrade compared to Windows XP, even if you - like I do - use the old color scheme and windows style without any useless fancy Aero drek. Vista's "improvements" are usually just fucking annoying time wasters but today's bug really drove me crazy: As a localization "help" Vista set up aliases so the program files folder (amongst others) points to the same directory for different languages. In my case "c:/programme" is supposed to be an alias for "c:/program files" (or maybe the other way around). So far so good. What happened next is that I have installed the apache webserver to it's default location which is "c:/program files". It gets mirrored in c:/programme and everything is fine. Or so you'd think until you try to modify any of it's installation files (like the server config say). I shut down the service, modify httpd.conf and restart apache. No change. I look into the conf and verify that I did indeed change the file. I restart apache. No change. I restart Windows. No change. After a while of banging my head against this I finally figure out that I actually have two (!) httpd.confs - one in c:/programme and on in c:/program files. I scratch my head and go WTF?! I compare both files and voila: only one of them is changed. Ok, so save the changes to the other as well. No deal. File cannot be changed. Uninstall apache. Service is gone. c:/programme/apache... is gone. c:/program files/apache is not gone! WTF?!

Lesson learned: stay away from Vista's fucking helpful aliased folders. I should have known better after having a very similar problem with an "undeletable" file in my start menu which suffers from the same "feature" and kept reappearing magically after having been deleted.

Thanks but no thanks Microsoft.

Current setup: Apache installed to f:/WebServer and everything's fine.

Armes Deutschland. Pro Kind 100 Euro, pro Auto 2500 Euro. Wenn das eine Investition in die Zukunft sein soll will ich in dieser Zukunft nicht leben. Sagt doch einiges aus über die gesellschaftliche Wertschätzung - des Deutschen liebstes Kind - sein Auto.

Herdentrieb hat schon recht:

Was soll zudem dieser Fokus auf die Autoindustrie? Warum überlässt man nicht den Verbrauchern, wie sie ihr Geld ausgeben? Der Markt für Autos ist im Grunde gesättigt ? wir brauchen sicher andere Autos als bisher, aber ganz sicher nicht mehr so viele wie in den vergangenen Jahren. Nehmen wir einmal an, dass jeder, der einen Führerschein hat und fahren kann, auch ein Auto besitzt. Das kommt bei 41,2 Mio. zugelassenen PKWs etwa hin. Bei einem Durchschnittsalter des Bestands von acht Jahren ergibt sich eine durchschnittliche Lebensdauer der Autos von rund 16 Jahren, was wiederum bedeutet, dass der jährliche Ersatzbedarf ein sechzehntel von 41,2 Mio. beträgt: Das sind im Gleichgewicht 2,6 Mio. neue Autos pro Jahr. Da deren Haltbarkeit ständig zunimmt, dürfte die Zahl in Wirklichkeit sogar noch niedriger sein. Warum sollte es eine Katastrophe sein, wenn sich die Neuzulassungen auf diesem Niveau einpendeln. Im Jahr 2007 waren es noch 3,15 Mio.

Abgesehen davon, dass jede andere Branche berechtigterweise eine ähnliche Förderung ihrer Produktion verlangen könnte, macht es aus ökologischen Gründen keinen Sinn, die Leute zum Autofahren zu animieren. Sollte das Konjunkturpaket nicht auch eine Umweltkomponente haben? Ich plädiere erneut dafür, die Mehrwertsteuer für einen Zeitraum von drei Jahren um drei Punkte zu senken, damit die Kaufkraft der Haushalte wirksam gestärkt wird, und im Gegenzug die Steuern auf den Energieverbrauch dauerhaft zu erhöhen, mit einem Nettoeffekt von 15 Mrd. Euro für die ersten drei Jahre: Die Umwelt würde sich freuen und die Abhängigkeit von Energieimporten würde sinken, abgesehen von dem kräftigen allgemeinen Nachfrageschub, den die steuerliche Nettoentlastung auslösen dürfte.

Now this my friends, is a truly beautiful toy. Aesthetic flash game if I ever saw one.

More fotos.

Thomas just blogged about BinDiff 3.0 (DifferDeluxe).

I have participated in one of the game prototyping challenges over at DanC's Lostgarden. The game (I'd rather call it a toy) is about peas thinking they are ninjas. They climb up blocks you place for them and jump from the highest points they can reach. If they survive they'll score points for every bounce - the higher the fall better. For detailed game rules and all the elite ninja moves the peas can do visit Dan's description of the game design.

Keys:
- ESC quits the game
- Space spawns peas
- Left mouse places a block
- Right mouse deletes a block
- Mousewheel or arrow keys cycle through available block types
That's about it.

Full source is included. Depends on a couple of external libraries. Do whatever you want with it - would be cool to send an email my way telling me whether it was useful.

There are a couple of known bugs, mainly that some impacts don't register properly, peas can get stuck when "overbuilt" and that peas will sometimes float through blocks until they are back on course. It's fully playable though and all basic game mechanics work as intended.

Download here.

cheers,

BuschnicK

An article about plastic pollution in our oceans.

Except for the small amount that?s been incinerated?and it?s a very small amount?every bit of plastic ever made still exists.

Seriously scary stuff. Why do we wrap candy in packaging that'll survive the product and it's consumer by hundreds of years?

SUV sales plummeting

Stephen King on video game violence

Could Massachusetts legislators find better ways to watch out for the kiddies? Man, I sure hope so, because there's a lot more to America's culture of violence than Resident Evil 4.

What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture ? not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter ? as a whipping boy. It's easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America's almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim ? falsely, it turned out ? that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.

Take a look at this advertisement photo for an "American Dream Home". You have to wonder whether this was even built for humans - I can't see an entrance except coming in through the garages.


I for one would certainly prefer to live in an area like this:



Fortunately, some people still have some common sense left, are not afraid to voice it and actually have some say in urban planning and city design. Here is an inspiring interview with Hermann Knoflacher.

Es lebe das Mittelklasse Gehzeug!

While reading the The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Comprehensive Edition (with a weight of 8kg the heaviest book I own ;-) ) I thought it would be a real shame if all our virtual architecture, i.e. computer game levels, especially 3D maps and buildings, will be lost forever once the corresponding games cease to work on new hardware. Alas, this being the internet, someone has thought of this before (for example SamSahrani). I for one would like to see a museum of computer game architecture. Think of the floating in space jump pad levels of Quake3, the organic "in an alien body" maps of System Shock 2 or the rotating maps of Unreal Tournament. Or the more realistic maps of the various World War 2 games or Halflife. Not to mention the online worlds in World of Warcraft, Second Life or the Sims. There are tons of very creative examples like this. Would be a shame to lose all that creativity. Architecture is architecture after all. The virtual kind may have different constraints and trade-offs than the real world one, but just like the real thing it's a mix of art and craft.

Either that or I'm just nostalgic for countless lost hours sank into self made levels for DooM 2, Duke Nuke'em and Quake 3.

I took the politcal compass test and scored:
Economic Left/Right: -6.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.95
which, according to the test, puts me in a group with Nelson Mandela, Ghandi and the Dalai Lama. Fine with me I guess, considering George W. Bush, Hitler and Stalin are also on the map...

Kleine Utopie

My brother is one of the puppets on the stairs and wrote and performed the song (second half of the video).

Buffet invests in railroads, railroads are cheaper, safer, make more ecologic sense, use less space and make less noise than cars.

Ah wtf. This was supposed to become a somewhat coherent entry about trains, investment opportunities and shit. I'll go sit on the balkony with my girl now instead of rambling.

Why don't you go and buy a "car-scratcher" from cycles for heroes in the meantime?

From a Bloomberg article:

Gasoline use is rising almost 5 percent above the five-year average.
[...]
Many Americans have no choice but to drive more, says Christopher Knittel, an economist who studies fuel consumption at the University of California in Davis.

Argh! There is lots of bad stuff to say about Sony, like it distributing rootkits for the good of the customer, but this time it's personal. I was dumb enough to buy a portable minidisc player (before all the mp3 players came out). The hardware is kinda ok, but the software must be the most hideously rotten piece of fucked up shit ever let lose on humankind. Of course it's your only option to use with the hardware. Of course it's windows only. Of course it has to scan all your drives in order to "register" your music. Naturally it only writes Sony native formats. Of course it doesn't read ogg vorbis. Of course it crashes about once a minute. For updating it you can of course be expected to install Internet Explorer (Sony's page doesn't like FireFox) and restart your computer about 500 times. Also, a simple download cannot be done without ActiveX and Flash activated. etc etc... It's just unbelievable that they should get away with it. Die Sony! Die, die, die!

Go Apple go! Drive em into the ground.

"If you took a nap in your office in a big company, it would seem unprofessional. But if you're starting a startup and you fall asleep in the middle of the day, your cofounders will just assume you were tired."

Paul Graham in his latest essay "Why to Not Not Start a Startup"

Although I've written large chunks of this software I'm not a typical user of it (i.e. I'm usually producing my own bugs instead of taking someone else's apart in binary code). All the more interesting to see what kind of (freaky I might add) stuff folks pull off with it. Ero published a nice article where he shows some debugging work, stringing together a PE executable with a hex editor of all things!

A couple of "human flowers" - highway interchanges viewed from above. The last one is from the movie "Alpha Dog". More in the "Museum of Ridiculous Highway Design".
Apparently abominations like these are but a small sacrifice for "personal freedom"...

Today he missed the rising sun by three hours. He met his day in the shower, washing his hair with shampoo that was guaranteed to have never been put in a bunny's eyes and from which ten percent of the profits went to save the whales. He lathered his face with shaving cream free of chlorofluorocarbons, thereby saving the ozone layer. He breakfasted on fertile eggs laid by sexually satisfied chickens that were allowed to range while listening to Brahms, and muffins made with pesticide-free grain, so no eagle-egg shells were weakened by his thoughtless consumption. He scrambled the eggs in margarine free of tropical oils, thus preserving the rain forest, and he added milk from a carton made of recycled paper and shipped from a small family farm. By the time he finished his second cup of coffee, which would presumably help to educate the children of a poor peasant farmer named Juan Valdez, Sam was on the verge of congratulating himself for single-handedly saving the planet just by getting up in the morning. He would have been surprised, however, if someone had told him that it had been two years since he had set foot on unpaved ground.

- Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue.

the freeways are a psychological
entanglement of
warped souls,
dying flowers in the dying hour
of the dying day....

what you see on the freeway is just what there is,
a funeral procession of the dead,
the greatest horror of our time in motion.

- Charles Bukowski

Pollution in China, already at disastrous levels, is growing faster than anyone could possibly control it. English Der Spiegel article on China

And what are we doing? Investing money into the "emerging markets", feeling disappointed when they don't reach our 30% p.a. growth expectations. Poisoning themselves to death is alright as long as we profit and the dirt stays on the other side of the globe. Now that the first clouds drift over Europe and Japan people at least start noticing...

China is expected to trump the biggest current polluter, the US, in the very near future. I bet you a thousand carbon credits that will be used as an excuse to pollute even more, not less. The argument you hear even now goes something like this: Why should I cut back on my emissions or my environmental footprint - look at them, they are even worse than me! If I change, that won't make a difference anyways. You'd think this argument is so obviously flawed noone would fall for it. Yet at the same time you hear it again and again. People driving their fucking cars everywhere because "what difference does my Prius make compared to his evil SUV?" I don't need to change my habits. Not me. Not me.
By this logic you can justify any crime because there'll always be one that is worse...

There is an analysis of this phenomenon in mathematical game theory: Cooperation would be for the net benefit of everyone, yet it's for your own short term benefit not to cooperate and thus it never works. Unfortunately nature suffers from exactly this phenomenon. For the global good of the planet nations should be able to agree on environmental policy yet it's in everyone's short term interest to let "the others do it" and boost the local economy instead.

Everyone will cry foul at China once we finally reach the tipping point. Yet they are only repeating our mistakes. If we were allowed to make them and if we have the right to our standards of living - why shouldn't they? It's gonna get real nasty once the roles reverse - imagine the reckless USA having to play economic catch up with China. Uh oh.

A new coal fired power plant per week - I bet you we'll be building nuclear power plants by the dozen in the name of ecology and green energy before I turn 35. Just so we stop the immediate threat.

Us fucking hypocrits.

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It's a daring story with lots of characters and parallel plots all revolving around cryptography, gold treasure hunting and second world war action. This in itself is not really compelling. What is though, at least for me, is that this is a book by a geek for geeks and about geeks.
It's written by a geek because Stephenson has a way of playing language kungfu that seems to scream look at my wits/IQ and goes off on weird tangents all the time. It appeals to the inherent multi-tasking addiction in your average nerd in that you can ponder some off-hand remark and fancy idea thrown at you in a subordinate clause while continuing through the main thread.
It's written for geeks - who else would want to read detailed descriptions of crypto-systems as part of a novell? But that's actually besides the point. The real reason is that geekdom is characterized so well in this book that you could actually use it as a definition. The leading characters are all more or less socially inept almost to the point of autists or Asbergers and at the same time math geniouses living in their own alternate realities. I laughed out loud at a scene at a dinner table where Randy, chronically forgetting all the unimportant details about the people around him, like - say - names, blurts into the discussion after enduring silently for a while and turns it into a heated debate. The sarcastic remark is that "normal" people flock into "consent groups" soon-after, because a real argument is too strenuous.
And it's about geeks... well, just take the title for a hint.

I really enjoyed it.

I wasn't in the mood for "real" work this afternoon so I decided to bug my girlfriend instead. She has developed a serious Sudoku addiction lately and solves them by the dozen. I thought it was a beautiful problem for a genetic algorithm to solve so I gave it a shot. The whole thing took little over 3 hours to code, starting from scratch using only the STL and MFC. The result won't win any beauty prices and is most certainly not the fastest or most intelligent solver out there - but it works.

I've used the most basic of all GAs, implementing truncation selection for selecting suitable parents. Childs are created by using the first n blocks of one parent and the last 9 - n from the other. Mutation is archieved by simply swapping random fields in a block. The fitness function counts how often a digit appears in a row or a column, every deviation from one counts as an error.

Sudoku is a pretty hard problem for a GA because it has many solutions with the same error count, i.e. the same fitness. Such a multimodal error function needs a GA that is better capable of exploration vs exploitation than mine. Using truncation selection for inheritance is pretty bad, cause it will not usually try enough approaches and easily get stuck in local minima. I "solved" the problem by simply using a high chance for mutations and thus a high random factor.

You can tell that the GA isn't very good for exploring because it is highly dependant on the initial parameters and population. Usually, if you choose the right GA for the problem at hand, GAs are pretty robust and don't change much with respect to initialization.

As it is, the algorithm needs a couple of seconds and about five to ten thausand iterations to solve a moderately complex sudoku. For the fiendish and extra hard problems it'll take minutes and several hundred thausand iterations.

Anyways - that was fun ;-)

I have received a very well done eBay phishing spam mail that made it through both of my spam filters. I took the time to actually read the thing. It has a pretty long winded explanation of why I owe eBay some money and goes on to say where I should transfer it and how much. The line stating the amount due contained a pretty funny error:

Faelliger Gesamtbetrag:
||%RND_FIRST_DIGIT50,68

%RND_FIRST_DIGIT ?! LOL! I owe someone a random amount of money ;-) I can only assume that the original spam mail was generated in a different language (most likely english) and a different character set. I guess the dollar symbol was supposed to be replaced by a euro one and the parser choked on that. And, btw, we put our currency symbol at the end of the number, not in front anyways.


On another note I stumbled across some malware recently that infects your machine and goes on to encrypt random pieces of your data. It then pops up a dialog telling you your data is being held hostage and that you have to pay a certain amount to get the password to unlock it again. I found this a very creative idea and wonder if they actually do earn money with it? More original than just deleting and destroying stuff randomly in any case.

I guess with good open source encryption like: http://www.truecrypt.org/ it would actually be quite simple to write such a trojan that would work very well indeed.

I have been busy at work recently building neural network ensembles for solving quite a complex prediction/classification problem. There are two major issues to solve for my particular problem:

1) How do you reduce the dimensionality of your input data to something manageable while still maintaining the relevant information?

2) How do you find a set of neural networks that each produces good results individually while making it's prediction errors in disjoint areas of the input space, thus archieving maximal benefit from grouping.

In my research for 1) I've stumbled across two majorly cool algorithms: Isomap and Locally Linear Embedding. Both of which try to solve the same problem: Finding the inherent dimensionality of a dataset hidden in a high dimensional input space (finding an embedded manifold). As a simple example you can view the 2D still fotograph of a three dimensional object as a vector of pixels. This vector will have an insanely high number of components (i.e. dimensions), your average digital camera has millions. On the other hand the real world object they describe usually has far less degrees of freedom, thus needing far fewer components to be described. The aforementioned papers both have very cool graphical examples for this.
Unfortunately both algorithms suffer from the fact that you cannot train them on one dataset and subsequently apply them to another, unknown, one. Real world problems are often of this nature though... Still, I think they are among the coolest ideas in recent years and definately a worthwhile direction for more research.
I also investigated Self Organizing Maps, but they suffer from the same problem like LLE and IsoMap and additionally also include quantization as a necessary step, thus corrupting your data more than necessary.
In the end, I settled for boring old plain vanilla principal component analysis, which manages to simplify my data at least a little bit.

For the second problem ( 2) mentioned above) the primary issues are how to determine network topology in the first place and how to compare networks against each other. I implemented a genetic algorithm growing thausands of networks, thus solving the network topolgy problem in some pretty brute force way. Comparing network quality is more difficult than it sounds though, the standard mean squared error usually used in training backpropagation nets isn't very useful for this. I ended up creating a gini curve/coefficient for my alpha beta errors (it's a two class classification problem) and, more importantly, scatterplots of the output neurons' activation. The latter plots are very interesting, creating funky curves for certain training configurations and transfer functions (radial basis functions are most freaky). They also offer insight into the particular training samples a net makes errors on, thus allowing an optimal strategy for choosing a set of nets.

Fun ;-)

Late at night I'm lying awake reading. My girlfriend curled up close to me, sound asleep. Her slow breathing and the soft rustle of pages turning the only sounds reaching me in my little island of light. I'm through with the book, thoughts wandering in comfortable idleness. Everything seems slow, silenced, numbed in happy melancholy. The book is over, the story ended. I start wondering about the author and read the cover flap:

BuschnicK is.

leaving.
working.
having.
teaching.
winning.
publishing.
living.
writing.

The author's description flap reduced to the verbs. Reduction. Time is a glacier.

One of the companies I work for has a contract for a project which is clearly military in nature. I refused to work on that project for moral reasons, as did many of my fellow colleagues. Anyways, the ensuing discussions reminded me of an excellent movie:

From the movie Good Will Hunting. Will is a young maths genious and is being interviewed for a job at the NSA:

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

I'm working on a side project of mine involving a webcam, a projector and shadows. Anyways, webcams only have very small lenses and thus a strong fisheye distortion effect towards the edges. I needed a way to get rid of that. I dug out my copy of the excellent open source OpenCV image library and found a nice little function to do that for me. You can see the result in this post. The first image is the original, distorted one, the second is the undistorted version and the third shows the calibration object pattern detection.

Next step is getting rid of the trapezoid distortion which should be far easier since it only involves a linear transformation as opposed to the radial lens distortion. Finding suitable reference points will be interesting though (or pins as such fix points are called in GIS applications).

Notes on the human visual system and perceptual image analysis and segmentation

This is intended to become a loose collection of links and notes to gather my thoughts, ideas and resources on the topic in one place. Usually I have an unorganized mess of scribbles on various post-its, hyperlinks sitting in emails, browser favourites and text files. Also, this collection is intended to provoke feedback and get your neurons going, maybe we could spark some new ideas.

Human perception, especially vision, is still an active research area and many things are yet unknown. On the other hand it is of tremendous interest to decipher nature's tricks. With today's computing power and camera systems lots of highly useful and practical applications could be built - if only we had the right algorithms to deal with the data. One of the most important and relatively low level vision tasks is segmenting an image into it's semantic parts and components. Human's do that tremendously efficient and fast, without even concious thought. Computers on the other hand are still relatively inept at this task and only perform well for certain small subsets of the general problem. So the first thing should be trying to understand how humans do image segmentation.

Theories about the human visual system (some proven and true, others not) and ideas of how to emulate them algorithmically:

- different light wavelengths provoke reactions of varying intensity on the retina. For example we can distinguish different shades of green far more easily and in greater fidelity than any other color. Evolutionary this makes perfect sense, considering that the great outdoors living habitat presents itself primarily in greens.
Conclusion: model the colorspace accordingly, i.e. vary the dynamic range (bitdepth) used for representing signal strength in certain wavelengths. In the simplest case this means having more bits available for representing green than for any other color.

- Humans perceive certain colors to be similar to each other while others appear dissimilar.
Conclusion: model the colorspace accordingly, i.e. find a color space such that some mathematical metric represents human perception in color differences. One such colorspace is the CieLAB colorspace which has been devised with several hundred test candidates such that the euclidian distance metric corresponds to perceived color similarity. It still has quite a lot shortcomings though (see appendix).
Problems: As opposed to this model human color perception is not absolute, but spatially and contextually varying. Our perception of color depends on the colors directly surrounding it and the number and type of colors visible simultaniously. It is easier to see color variation in a local color gradient than to count the number of different shades of a color randomly dotted all over an image. Also, we can only distinguish so many colors at once (a relatively small number).

- The human eye is not modelled on a regular grid. Rather the perceptors are irregularly spaced on a rounded surface (the inner surface of the eye). On the other hand all artificial sensors adhere to a strict, regular and flat lattice. Question: does the irregularity of signal sampling in the human eye have any advantages over a fixed grid? Is it more robust dealing with aliasing problems? Is it more robust against over saturation with a certain spatial frequency? What purpose does it serfe?

- Physical light intensity does not correspond 1 to 1 to perceived light intensity. Research indicates that perceived intensity approximately follows a logarithmic function of physical, measured, intensity. Computers already try to capture this effect for example with the nonlinear gamma curve for display devices. When modelling a color space or normalizing one this should be taken into account.

- Humans seem to be more sensitive to changes in brightness than in color. The human eye has far more intensity than color receptors. This indicates that a color space that models brightness or intensity seperately from color would be desirable. Color could be represented with fewer bits than brightness. When building gaussian or laplacian image pyramids brightness could be sampled with a smaller (higher frequency) filter kernel while color could be smoothed much more with a larger filter producing a "perceptual image pyramid".
BTW, why are all the usual color spaces 3 dimensional? There is nothing inherently 3 dimensional about color. Would it make sense to find another representation? (Update: there actually seems to be a theory saying color is at least 3 dimensional)

- Humans only focus on a very small part of the whole visible field of view at a time. The spatial and color resolution of the eye falls off towards the edges. Color can only be perceived in the center of the field of view. Both of these facts would imply a non-linear, non-kartesian, coordinate system to represent images. The log-polar coordinate system might be one such choice, giving high spatial resolution at it's center and falling off towards the edges. Thus one could model a sharp and crisp "center of attention" while suppressing noise and uninteresting detail in the surrounding area. This would only deal with the spatial issue though. A similar approach should be used for color, so that an image fades to gray towards the eges and color detail is reduced.

- The human eye and associated nervous system is organized higly hierarchical. Processing and understanding of the received data happen at each level of the hierarchy. Some simple metrics and information seem to be gathered very early in the process such as "it's dark/it's bright". Vertical and horizontal breakage lines are detected pretty early (probably because they are needed for navigating our three dimensional surrounding) as are foreground and background objects. Foreground segmentation is a particularly interesting subject since a lot of information seems to be used here. Examples would be: is the object in motion; a tendancy to place objects "on the ground", i.e. the lower part of an image where gravity would have them; a light vs. dark object segmentation; stereoscoping 3D segmentation, i.e. how close is the object. The last part of the system is the actual pattern and heuristics matching happening in the visual cortex. Pattern matching meaning matching the brain's database of actual known objects to the newly encountered ones. Heuristics matching means matching known physical truths to a probably unknown object (This last point is especially interesting since it implies that things that "cannot be true" won't easily be perceived. Supposedly this is anectotedly true for the first sightings of Columbus' ships by the natives - they didn't know such constructs and thus had problems "seeing" them - although they were huge).
The hierarchical layout implies that an artificial perception system should probably be modelled the same way. Basic receptors, followed by ever more complex and complicated feature detectors followed by logic combining those features into semantic objects. Maybe some form of neural net with different types of neurons and different layers serving the individual detection tasks could be constructed for this.

- Humans have two eyes. Stereo vision is useful for 3D navigation, but is also used for detecting redundancies and suppressing noise in 2D images. Also, the focus area is in the field of view of both eyes giving extra detail and resolution, while the edges of the image are only ever in the field of view of one eye. This again hints at a non-cartesian image representation with detail fall-off towards the edges. Maybe sensors could be built or refitted to produce stereo vision images as well.

- Similar to the center of attention mentioned earlier humans seem to have something like locally dominant colors. We can only sense so many colors at once (a relatively small number) so we see certain areas as one homogenous color even if they are not. Similarily our ability to discertain colors directly depends on how many different colors are visible at once. It is easier to spot a smooth color gradient than to discertain shades of the same color in a chaotic patch of different colors. This could probably be modelled by a clustering algorithm (k-means, meanshift, self organizing maps, ...) in color space, finding the locally dominant colors.

- While computer image analysis usually only works on one image at a time humans naturally blend several impressions of the same visual stimulus over time. I don't know whether the human eye has a concept of "frame rate/frames per second" or whether that would be constant for all receptors or different (it would be possible for example, that the gray receptors have faster circuit times than the color receptors, thus giving light intensity higher time resolution). All this is important in analysing motion of course, but even for static images it makes sense to view it over time. A human seeing an image for some time will gradually notice more and more detail. Due to the imperfect nature of our sensors (eyes) still frames will have a certain amount of noise and inaccuracies in them. Interpolating over time will eliminate most of these. Also, it allows one to focus on different or more details once the basics have been analyzed. Putting all these factors together it seems humans have a hiararchic system over time, reducing noise and redundancies and analyzing in increasing amount of detail.

- Texture. Texture is an exceedingly complicated and overloaded term. There is not even a standard way to define what texture means. Yet at the same time humans have no trouble whatsoever recognizing objects of same texture. Why is that? Texture describes some spatial relationship between colors and intensities, a pattern. It is not necessarily exactly repeating (the texture of a plant leaf is always the same, yet at the same time it is unique for each leaf and from one square centimetre to the next). It is not necessarily of uniform scale. It is not easy to describe in simple geometric terms (clouds). It does not necessarily appear uniform in color or intensity. Nevertheless, there must be at least some characteristics appearing constant and non-varying to the human observer, so he can group parts of an image by their texture. Texture is a hierarchical term again. Viewed from a distance at coarse detail a patch of lawn will appear textured uniformely. Viewed in close detail the individual blades of gras will appear totally chaotic.
There are multitudes of approaches to capturing texture in mathematical terms, most of them deriving some form of statistical features from gray value intensities. There are fourier descriptors, wavelet transforms, coocurance matrices, color clusterings, bayesian predictors, neural networks, genetic algorithms, self organizing maps, active contours/snakes, ... Each one of these is a valid approach and fit at capturing one aspect of texture. However none of them is adequat for the general problem.



To sum up: obviously the human visual system is a highly sophisticated, highly dynamic and hierarchically organized system. It seems difficult if not impossible to model all of it's capabilities with only one algorithm. It seems more logical to start at the bottom of the hierarchy, with the simple or even trivial transformations and interpretations and work the way up. Ideally keeping the interfaces open such that at each step each algorithm is pluggable and replacable by a different, possibly better, one.
Another very important preprocessing step is determing what will be the basic inputs to the whole system. These inputs should be modelled as close to the outputs of the receptors in the human eye as possible.

I'm a big fan of emergent behaviour and believe a lot of nature's power comes from systems organized in such a way. Very basic and simple basic blocks in large quantities work together to archieve more than the sum of their parts. Examples for systems like these are all of a human's senses, each of which is built from tiny receptors, the human nervous system and brain and, on a larger scale, ant colonies. These systems exhibit a lot of very desirable properties: they scale well, they are robust to noise, they are robust to defects in individual agents, they do not have a single point of failure or a single mastermind, they are easily parallelizable and they are easy to construct (since each individual agent is trivial). Artificial examples for algorithms with these qualities would include neural nets, self organizing maps, autonomous agent systems (ants) and genetic algorithms. The idea is to build a hierarchy of lots of very simple building blocks and hope that something useful will evolve from that.

Ok, now I'll start working on my genetically evolving, self organizing, hierarchical neural network based on fuzzy logic maths - it will call you and tell you when it's done and ready to take over the world ;-)


Information about the eye and vision:
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/

Irregular grid sampling:
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Basic/

Perceptual image pyramids:
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~siavosh/iccv05.pdf

Log-Polar image representation:
http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~alex/Projects/TemplateTracking/logpolar.htm

Locally dominant color adaptive segmentation:
http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~pappas/papers/jqchen_tip05.pdf

Experimental Determination of Visual Color and Texture Statistics for Image Segmentation:
http://commnet.ece.northwestern.edu/~jqchen/docs/spie05.pdf

Human visual system foreground background detection:
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/xge1312194.pdf

Stereo vision correspondence comparison:
http://cat.middlebury.edu/stereo

Comparison and benchmarking datasets for different segmentation strategies:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/grouping/segbench

Autonomous agents and pheromone maps for digital image segmentation (this one is just soo cool ;-) ):
http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/Vramos-WCLC05b.pdf

Problems with the CIE Lab color space:
http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/evaluation/cie_lab/index.htm

plus a gazillion more in my bookmarks and littered all over the place. I hope I'll come around to organizing them.