Thursday, April 28, 2005

Thinking Machine 4

Have you seen the computer think?
Go to: Thinking Machine 4

Try out our Vish. Anand's opening of NF3. Watch computer go bonkers.

About Thinking Machine & What you have to do:

You're white. To begin the game, move one of your pieces...

When it is your (White's) turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. in the left image below, you can see waves over the squares around the king and (very lightly) over the squares where the pawns might capture. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board; see image at right. The curves show potential moves--often several turns in the future--considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white.
Courtesy: Shibin

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

"2 minute doodles" - Explained

Stating only the not obvious.

The doodler here is not me. It’s my mind. This fellow is a very restless character. I force him to be with me all the time when I am doing work or concentrating. When I am not doing any work (which is most of the time), he jumps at the opportunity, and goes wandering. He is one hell of a nomad, trust me. One moment he is in one world and the next second he manages to time travel into another world that is light years apart.

In between this aimless wandering of his, he does something even more aimless (at least that’s what I believed he did). He doodles into his imaginary notepad (and NOTE: only for 2 minutes, he does not have time you see).

Some days I let him drift off into his own world, giving him all the time that he needs. That’s when I get to spend time with him, that’s when I get to know him better. The difference here is that; it’s not him with me here, it’s me with him. I open his notepad, go through his doodles, trying to figure out what this guy has scribbled. It takes time to decipher. Yes, but the picture that gets uncovered, needs to be described. Further, it needs to be shared. That is what I am going to do here…verbalize and caboodle the doodles.

Petrichor

Yes that’s the smell of rain on dry ground.

On the parched mind of mine,
when there is a downpour of shine.
out come such lines.

Woven on my countenance,
a distributed rainbow too can be seen.
Its colour dispersed across my cheeks,
And the arc inverted over my lips.

How to name it?
The “it” here is my blog.
The answer lay in the word “Petrichor”.
A perfect Greek word,
for this Indian’s English lines.

This guy who wrote the above lines did not exist 21 years ago.
All my past, all I’ve been is this guy who would manipulate sentences spoken into funny jokes.
Always believed that dreaming and writing was a jobless poet’s job.
Used to wonder how a person can be so damn unproductive.

I guess the word “unproductive” gave me away. Hmm..trueI’ve been an engineer all along.
It’s in the genes you see.
Never been the kind who wrote anything.

@ College as an electronics and communications engineer, I engineered stuff with diodes, transistors and resistors.
@ Work as software engineer, am engineering stuff with code.
Even when I started writing, I did not write it, I engineered it. That was the first time, I saw the product. “Saw” is not the word. “Felt” is the word. (Psst..Psst..you know what…I was thinking of calling the blog “Felt Pen”….It was only later did I that realise such a word did not exist. It's “Felt tipped pen”. How ignorant of me?). I felt the product. Not a tangible one though. As a friend of mine once told, "it is better left untold".
The experience was in one word, satisfying -as bold as it gets
.

I have not written much. I don’t know if I will continue to either. The irony is, I am being a true modern civil engineer here (not Mr.Roark). I am building (note the word) a home here, totally ignorant of the future inhabitants, totally unanswerable to the question that I ask myself “Will there be any inhabitants at all?”.

Coming to the point, if I was a true poet / writer (I doubt if I can even imagine being one. That explains it. When I cannot even imagine, how can I be one? Keyword: Imagine – (effect of reading technical papers) – and this braces inside braces funda tells you how much of a mathematician I am), I would have named my blog Petrichor.

Looking at the above sentence philosophically, an engineer / mathematician lives inside “(“ and “)”, and the poet…???

Kripa……Where have you been hiding this philosopher in you? Or is this too a manifestation of the poet? ..... I am getting goosebumps.

Continuing from where I left, ya…..My past surfaced as I was typing the name of my blog in the small text box (it did not feel like me) and I decided to call it “2 minute doodles”. (I guess people who know me, will be able to relate to it better when I say “my past”).

Mr.so-called-writer told Mr-so-called-engineer, “Hey, you took your space with the font-size of 24 alrite...Better put me at least in the area with a font of 12”..So that explains the reason behind this blog.

I feel like a person enjoying the Multiple Personality Disorder.

Let’s see what future holds…