Hack & Play

Random AI implemented

2012-10-07T13:51:00.002-07:00

It's been a little quiet about meowBG lately, since I haven't had the time to program a lot. Besides, the meowBG project had reached a state where it's difficult to continue implementing, because things have grown a little too complicated to just sit down at my desk and hack a few lines of code.

I guess this is a state where a software project may die ... it just takes a little too much thought to get going. And the longer I put the project aside, the more difficult it became to continue coding.

But meowBG made it through that trough, and meanwhile I implemented a very dumb "bot" who will pick random moves from the list of possible moves. I reorganized the match structure, too, so that the game doesn't always assume a human player on one side of the board, but it is possible to register any two "player"-like objects at the match. This could be, of course, a human player, but might as well we a bot or a player on the other side of an online BG server like FIBS.

So I registered two of my bots to play versus each other. Check it out:

An idea that really excites me is to build a neural network using PyBrain as an opponent. Should meowbg fail as a FIBS/Tigergammon client, maybe this will become a different project.

Clickable dummy finished

2012-08-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

Things have progressed nicely so far, even though I took a little longer (as usual) to grasp some of the basic concepts of kivy. I managed to finish a clickable backgammon dummy in a few days. Check it out:

I made only legal moves in that video, but any move would have worked, like moving backwards, piling up checkers of different colours etc. It's only a dummy without any logic underneath. That's the task lying ahead: Connect the existing meowBG logic to the new presentation layer.

meowBG going kivy

2012-08-08T02:49:00.000-07:00

I'm on holiday right now, and the last days I've been diving into the kivy framework. Kivy looks very promising, especially with respect to its multi-platform support. There has even been a kivy app released on Apple's app store. Hacking for iPhone and iPad in pure python? Me gusta!

So, after I've become a little tired of how sluggish my dear meowBG looks in its wxPython based implementation, I'm now planning to move the graphics parts entirely to kivy.

I'm especially looking forward to making the checkers fly smoothly across the board - the part that made my brain hurt in wxPython. It may be my lack of knowledge of wxPython, but animating widgets in kivy is just a walk in the park. Kivy's approach to animations is interesting: You define the animation independently of the widget it is applied to, and just specify the attributes that the animation will change. For instance, changing the position with an animation could work like this:

animation = Animation(pos=(100, 100), duration=0.2)

animation.start(target_widget)

This would move the object behind target_widget to the position (100, 100) within a fifth of a second. And of course you could specify a callback function to be called when the animation has finished, by setting

animation.on_complete = your_callback_func

meowBG logo improved

2012-06-30T16:11:00.000-07:00

I changed the logo colours, since the colour blue just didn't look natural beside a "wooden" board. Current version:

Apart from that I did some actual development and introduced two dialog windows: One that allows you to choose the target game server and input your credentials. The other one pops up when you invite someone and specify the length of the match. Nothing too exciting.

(me)meowBG

2012-06-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

The buttons of the meowBG gui seemed a little too heterogeneous, since I downloaded their graphics from different sites. So I decided to try something completely different: Meme buttons.

For the three buttons I have, two choices were pretty obvious: The challenge accepted meme for the accept button and the "NO" meme for the reject button. But which one to pick for the undo button? That was a tricky one, and I finally picked the Neil deGrasse Tyson Reaction meme, which allows for the alternative interpretation "Oops, I'll probably take that one back".

I plan to make the memes an optional button layout eventually, since the crowds of people using my program may prefer less distracting icons.

Now how about changing the name of my app to "memeowbg" or "me²owbg" ... or, since the intersection of people loving those memes and people loving backgammon is probably {me}, even "{me}me²owbg" ... ah, never mind.

meowBG, a wxPython based backgammon client

2012-05-27T12:45:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine is currently developing a backgammon server, and the idea of building a client was appealing, so I've started to expand my Python GUI programming knowledge a littler further and tried out wxPython.

A little background first: For reasons unknown to me, the name of the web server under development is "Tiger Gammon" (German site), and it's a nice alternative to FIBS, the First Internet Backgammon Server. Both servers communicate with clients over the telnet protocol, which seems odd at first. But when FIBS was born in 1992, that was probably the obvious choice. Tigergammon, on the other hand, strives to be a better FIBS, and thus uses telnet as well. So my client will have to follow that path.

In the meantime my wxPython client has grown pretty nice, but it's not ready for being shown off in public. But as of today, the client has its own splash screen, and I like it so much that I wanted to share it here. Since it's a client for tigergammon, I called it "meowBG", and when I found an old picture of our cat Alice sitting in a waste-paper basket, the logo just fell into place …

I ought to polish it a little more, but for my limited GIMP skills I guess that's as good as it gets. Should meowBG ever be released I may need a talented designer.

Posts about the client itself are soon to follow. Currently it looks like this ...

... which is not perfect but a decent start. Network play over either FIBS or tigergammon is already possible, but the user interface is still far from intuitive. Stay tuned!

An Ook! interpreter in Python

2011-06-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

A recent geocache introduced me to an esoteric language named "Ook!", which was designed for Orang-Utans to communicate without arousing human suspicion.

It's pretty simple, as the language consists of only three syntax elements:

Ook.
Ook!
Ook?

That's it. To make the language a little more powerful, elements are grouped into pairs, e.g. "Ook. Ook!" or "Ook? Ook.". So we have nine possible pairs and thus nine distinct commands, only eight of which are actually used ("Ook? Ook?" has been supplied with no deeper meaning ... maybe it's left for the Orang-Utan to express "WTF are you talking about?!").

When I felt an itch to implement an Ook! interpreter, I discovered that Ook! is all but identical to the well-known Brainfuck, since both languages have eight commands, and there exists a one-to-one mapping between them.

Furthermore, since Brainfuck is already a "minimal" language in that any command consists of one character only, I started off with the BF interpreter.

(Ok, to be totally honest, I started off implementing the Ook! interpreter, which eventually had bugs I wasn't able to track down anymore ... :) only then I realized what a stupid plan it was to begin with the Ook! part and started all over again, this time implementing the BF part first)

After finishing that, the remaining task was to implement a preprocessor which would turn an Ook! listing into a BF listing, and I was done.

If you're curious about the result, grab the code from github.

(It's my first project on github btw, and I absolutely recommend the github for mac application)

The marriage of Inform7 and geocaching

2011-05-09T13:14:00.000-07:00

Recently I stumbled across a terrific idea ... it all began in 1981. Really, it did. Because that was when my wife was born, inevitably determining her turning 30 in 2011.

So, faced with the upcoming event, I considered my options as to what I might give her for her anniversary. Thinking medium-hard for some time I came up with a medium-brilliant thought: I'd place her her very own geocache! She's pretty fanatical about that stuff, so that was a safe bet. I planned to build her a multi-staged cache.

Nothing too clever so far. Caches like this exist in the hundred-thousands.

... BUT ...

Two weeks before the actual event, a co-worker of mine introduced me en passant to something terrific: Inform7.

Inform7 deserves to be called a programming language. In a way, at least, as its declarative style combined with predicate logic reminds me of my Prolog days. On the other hand, its prose-like appearance gives it a fuzzy, yet natural touch. In a nutshell, it allows you to describe an entire world with all its objects, locations, people, as well as all the rules that apply in it, without making you feel too geeky.

And as soon as you're done, Inform compiles your description, and you get ... AN INTERACTIVE TEXT ADVENTURE! (All ye nerds scream "Yaaaaaaaaay" ...).

So, for instance, your source text might be

 
 Living-room is a room. 
 Kitchen is a room. 
 Kitchen is south of living-room.

and after compiling you're ready to play. Ok, not much adventure to experience yet, but add some pizza to the kitchen and a computer to the living-room, and it's not so far from some people's actual existence. ;-)

So when my colleague told me about that, I suddenly knew what I had to do: A hybrid of an old-school text adventure and a geocache - that was it! Ideas started flooding my mind as soon as the connection of the two concepts was established ... so many, indeed, that it was hard to keep track of all of them. In the same instant it was sort of exhausting to think of all the stuff I wouldn't be able to implement since first of all I wasn't in the least "fluent" in Inform7, and then there was the time issue: Two weeks only - how many ideas would have to remain unborn? :-)

The game map, as generated by Inform based on the relative positions of the rooms.

In the end I managed to build a small world consisting of 29 rooms, about half of which correspond to "real" places that the players needs to visit in order to collect clues there. Check out this snippet from the game, played entirely inside the browser:

Some of the clues were material, some purely virtual. It was a satisfying result after all. There are monsters in it (trolls, dragons ... standard RPG company), hidden places, keys and locks, hilarious jokes, of course, magic barriers and the like. Adventure veterans would certainly criticize its being a little too simple. Beginners will possibly claim the opposite. Who knows ... judge for yourself, but don't get frustrated! You cannot get past the dragons, as you need a "real" clue for that, so there's no chance you'll finish the game successfully. You'll have to enter the nonvirtual realm for that. :-)

The cache was a nice surprise for my unsuspecting wife, and - as of 9th of May - it is published and available under the name "Wandrin' Duck". I'm excited what kind of feedback I'll get from the geocachers' guild.

Still there's a lament in the back of my mind of all those ideas I left out ... maybe some other day.

init

2011-04-20T13:55:00.001-07:00

So I have my own blog now. Looking forward to writing again ...

Most of it will definitely be related to programming. My language of choice right now is Python, which I've been cherishing ever since I got my first job, where I applied as a Java programmer but ended up hacking Python instead. In retrospect, I'm pretty happy about how things turned out. Only recently I decided to get back to Java for a while, to have a "major" language under my belt, and boy it felt cumbersome after those pythonic years. But that's gonna be acceptable.

Still, I think it's time to try something new, and so I've been considering alternatives to my beloved reptilian language. In particular, I've grown interested in functional programming and iOS programming.

Hopefully I'll be able to speak about my favourite instrument, the guitar. I'm not sure yet what a blog post about an instrument might look like. Anyway, as I've been playing around with Garage Band lately, and I also have a piano available, there might be some experience or other that the other nerd/musician hybrids out there might appreciate hearing about.