User talk:Zyx

Archived Talks:

2009/05/06

Wiki Help

I'm trying to learn how to use the wiki, so probably will be asking more questions. But to start I would like to know how to add those nice content tables to the pages, I've been going trough the pages that has them and see nothing special in the code :-S. And as a more general second question, is there somewhere I can learn how to write wiki stuff? Particularly this one of course. --zyx 01:11, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Here is all about mediawiki syntax. MediaWiki automatically add the TOC once the page have more than 4 headers (inclusive) at before the first header. If you want to add the TOC manually, add __TOC__ to the page (like this page) » Nat | Talk » 01:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Another useful link I bookmarked recently is this MediaWiki cheatsheet. I tend to check mediawiki.org, or just Google (eg, mediawiki namespaces) when I'm looking for something specific. There's a lot of good info out there because so many people use MediaWiki. But I've learned a lot of what I know from people like Nat and AaronR doing stuff on this wiki. =) --Voidious 01:30, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Hey, you won't believe me that this is the first wiki (beside the old one) I've working on. I learn the thing from what AaronR and Nfwu used to done actually. » Nat | Talk » 01:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks guys, I'm too dinosaur-ish for web related stuff. This is the first wiki I've been, and have been moderator of two forums, but there I'm just as dumb as I am here :-P. --zyx 01:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Handle

I always realized that your handle was the last 3 letters in the alphabet, but it only just occurred to me that this is like the opposite of "ABC". I'm curious if that is intentional or just coincidence? (To be clear, I mean if it's inspired by ABC the Robocoder or not.) Kind of funny that two of our PL kings have such similar handles. =) --Voidious 18:16, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I think it is coincidence, because his email is zyx###@gmail.com (### replace with number, I don't remember which) » Nat | Talk » 08:49, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

It is a coincidence, I've been using zyx since nintendo times :). --zyx 11:56, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Melee Testing

How do you guys test melee bots? Not tool-wise, I know Voidious patched RoboResearch which I will probably use to test the melee bot as well soon. But I mean battle-wise, I was testing with the top 6 bots from different authors and 2 random middle bots, the other two spots were taken by two versions of my bots and ran 100 round battles and compare the results of my two bots to decide which one is better. But I knew that testing wasn't suitable, YersiniaPestis 3.0 can beat Shadow, Aleph a lot of times (~40% of times beats one of them), Portia every now and then and Fermat every time under that circumstances, but I knew that in reality battles don't such a high concentration of top bots so results were kind of irrelevant as rumble performance meant. Thanks. --zyx 21:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, I struggle with this too, but my attitude is to try to emulate the same mixes of bots that you'll face in the rumble. So you'd want the same range of skill levels, some battles with all weak bots, some with mid-range bots, and some with stronger bots. Right now my test bed is 27 bots, split into 6 groups (with each bot appearing twice), and I'll run ~20 seasons. For many versions of Diamond in a row, this was accurately predicting a rating increase or not. Then I released a version without much testing, its rumble rating went up, but I ran the test afterward and the score went down. :-/ So I'm still figuring it out myself, really. If you're curious about my test bed, it's here: dibed6.rrc. Good luck, and please let us know if you make any Melee test bed breakthroughs. =) --Voidious 21:30, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll check it later. If I do, I will. --zyx

Google Code Jam

I don't know if any of you like programming contests, but I'm actually a devoted contestant of those. Next week the Google Code Jam begins, which is an online contest similar to the ACM-ICPC or TopCoder contests but it has its differences, specially in the format and languages you can use (any language is fine, even BrainF#@k). I'll be participating in it, if anyone is interested in learing more about it go to CodeJam 2009. Hope at least some of you find it interesting so we can meet there. --zyx 16:38, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Good AI Books

Background: Buying books in Venezuela sucks, they are old, translated(I like to read the original author) and expensive.

My mom is currently visiting my brother in the UK, I always buy some books when she is over there since I love reading scientific or technical books. Currently I'm looking to expand my AI books collection since it is rather poor, and I thought maybe some of you could help me find a good choice. I already have Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach of Norvig and Russell, although it's the first edition and in Spanish so I'm considering the second edition in English. But besides that one which good AI books can you recommend? Also I have a couple of NN books so I would be more interested in something either general or specific to other subjects, but if you have a good NN book to recommend I wouldn't mind hearing and reading about it as well. Thanks in advance. --zyx 01:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't have any "general AI" books (could use some recommendations too) but the favourite of the ones I have is "Reinforcement Learning" by Sutton & Barto. As a bonus, it's actually available online. Leon and early versions of Pris use concepts from this book. For NN I have "Fundamentals of Neural Networks" by Fausett, but there are many more practical resources scattered about online. For example, "ai-junkie has some great tutorials on NN and genetic algorithms. --Darkcanuck 06:42, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know if you find it usefull, but at the university I study at we're using Artificial Intelligence, structures and strategies for complex problem solving by George F. Luger. It's been pretty general so far (I'm at chapter 4, and it has mostly been about treesearching strategies), and it's also nice to read. I'm wondering if I can incoorperate anything in robots... --Positive 17:35, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

For an Intro to Machine Learning class I took in my last semester of CS, one of the books we used was this: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, by David MacKay. The physical version of the book is sold normally, but you can download a PDF of the entire book for free as long as you agree not to print it out. I remember it being pretty "dense", as was the class, but I learned a lot. The only other book I can think of to mention is one that PEZ talked about a bit: The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. (PEZ talks about it here: oldwiki:CrowdTargeting.) Good luck - let us know how your search turns out. =) --Voidious 17:49, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all your responses, I won't buy the books recommended by Darkcanuck (the first one) and Voidious because I can download them and I have to save every penny, in Venezuela we have exchange control right now and we are only allowed to spend $400 on Internet each year :-S. The NN book, well I have some and as he said ai-junkie is a great place. The book Positive posted is really inexpensive so I was excited at first, but I read a bit on the Amazon preview and it seems fine but rather basic, I already have 3 undergraduate AI courses and I'm actually looking to do some graduate level studies now.

I will buy the second edition of A Modern Approach of Norvig and Russell as it seems to be the most recommended book all around the world, to have it as a reference rather than reading it in depth again. And just to please my self I will buy the first 2 books from the AI Game Programming Wisdom series, they seems to be in the same fashion as the Game Programming Gems series which I found to be amazingly interesting when I first read them. Thanks all, and I hope you get something out it as well. My mom comes back next week, I'll let you know then how good or bad the books end up being. --zyx 21:36, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I forgot to mention The Wisdom of Crowds is not an AI book, the author is a journalist and not a scientific in any way, I already mentioned some of this once Nat asked a question about it, but is actually more a psychological on how a crowd of people behaves. I think it had very positive feedback from people who read it for fun and very negative feedback from people who wanted it for scientific reasons, I read a bit of it long time ago and didn't find it very interesting but I myself only like scientific reading. --zyx 21:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Google sites got disabled?

Just to let you know, it seems your Google sites account recently got disabled "because of a perceived violation of the Terms of Service". Got all your robots hosted there on the participants lists switched over to the Darkcanuck's mirror. --Rednaxela 06:11, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for this. However, I just checked and seems the Google site is working again, I don't use it for anything else than this robots. Hopefully it still works because I want to try doing some robocoding again. --zyx 03:31, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Codefest Winnings

Hey Zyx, have you been contacted by anybody at Codefest about the prize money? I have yet to hear from anyone and am wondering if I'm alone in this situation. --KID 13:33, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

This is probably very late, I received the email like a week ago (around May 4th or 5th), but I saw your prize is marked as dispatching, so I guess you received it too. Sorry for the late reply, been too busy to check robo wiki. --zyx 20:58, 10 May 2011 (UTC)