October 2011
2 posts
Procedurally Generating Images in the Style of...
Introduction
Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter. His paintings with orthogonal lines and rectangular splashes of primary colors on white backgrounds are very recognizable.
I wondered what it would take to programmatically generate Mondrian-esque images. Here’s what I came up with.
The Algorithm
The algorithm operates on a two-dimensional grid. Initially, the grid is empty (white or...
Ricochet Robot
My friend introduced me to a board game called Ricochet Robot (or Rasende Roboter in its original German form). It’s a fun game, but I found it even more fun as a programming problem. I implemented the game in Python, including a user interface and a solver. After that, I sped up the solver tremendously by porting it to C.
The Rules
The board is a 16x16 grid. It is made up of 4...
August 2011
5 posts
If I'd Had the Internet...
I learned how to program at a young age. My dad bought a Commodore 64 when I was probably 7 or 8. I learned very basic aspects of the BASIC programming language. You know…
10 INPUT "What is your name?"; NAME$
20 PRINT "Hello "; NAME$
30 GOTO 20
When I was a little older, we had a Tandy 486 with Windows 3.1 and I spent a lot of time playing around with QBasic. The only resource I had to...
I'm not an "IT Guy"
The minute someone finds out I’m a software developer is the minute someone asks me to help them with their computer problems. Or I might be referred to as an “IT Guy.” This is something of a pet peeve for me. I generally try to avoid these situations altogether. It’s usually something like this:
Person: “So what do you do?”
Me: “I’m a computer...
Traffic Lights
When I was a kid, I had a mild obsession with traffic lights. I built models of them with my lego blocks. I dreamed that they were controlled by people who lived in the electrical boxes at each intersection, who had to shout at each other to stay in sync. I also sketched top-down drawings of roads and intersections.
As an adult, I still find traffic control interesting and I loathe inefficient...
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