goldkin: Another Goldkin squishie? Also by Jirlae? And it's *sleeping*? Bonus! (goldkin squishie sleeping)
While writing on another topic, I came up with an idea that I feel deserves a post of its own. I call it: the Internet Cat Test.

The formula is, for any given collection of elements:
[Information Content] = 1 - ( [Elements with Cat Photos] / [Size of Collection] )

Yielding: decimal percentages between 0 and 1, where 0 indicates minimal information, 1 indicates maximum information.

While this measure is just applied silliness, what it offers is a heuristic for how information rich a feed is, as an inverse proportion of information to cats. If the majority of content is images that create small, endorphin-rich feedback loops in the brain (ie, pictures of cats), that's far less exciting, mentally stimulating, and rewarding for long-term growth than content that's about just about anything else. Including Advice Animals.

Of course, we can teach computers to identify cats with at least 74.8% accuracy, so relying on meta information to identify cat images isn't strictly necessary. This is nothing more than a simplification of concepts like entropy theory and information density as they apply to the human brain, distilled into a small test you can try at home. Plenty of extension can be made, as we attain a better grasp of how information is encoded within the realms of human psychology and neuroscience.

I'm surely not the first person to observe this, but I figured I'd write it up for humor's sake, because I couldn't find it anywhere else. Happy catting!



Extra Credit: get this accepted as a topic in a major scientific journal.

Vanity

Jan. 8th, 2012 01:34 pm
goldkin: A goldkin squishie? By Jirlae? Here? Surely, you jest! (goldkin squishie awake)
[livejournal.com profile] lothnomicon linked this yesterday. I simply must share, because while this is another one of those create-your-own-dragon Flash games, its quality is reasonably good.

Image behind the cut )
goldkin: Another Goldkin squishie? Also by Jirlae? And it's *sleeping*? Bonus! (goldkin squishie sleeping)
The victory fanfare plays. Ditties string in the background, signaling accrued experience, levels gained, and spoils acquired. The lights fade to black as the fanfare abruptly cuts out. From the orchestra pit, the haunting tune of the overworld theme begins to play.

Squaresoft RPGs would be so much more interesting as stage directions.
goldkin: i has book (goldkin bookly)
While riding home on the bus a month ago, I came up with a neat puzzle for the computational theorists and enthusiasts in the audience. It's what I consider a simple tree search puzzle that I'm posting here mostly for entertainment purposes. You can probably do better than my solution, though; I'll leave the answer to all of you.


Suppose you are trying to write a speedrun in the vein of those for TASVideos.org. You are given a series of picross puzzles -- pictorial puzzles where the objective is to etch a black-and-white drawing into an NxN grid (for finite N) that initially starts as white and lets you fill in the black bits. As a further constraint on gameplay, the game was designed with cursor control in mind, meaning that you can only move the cursor to tick off boxes in one block increments, horizontally or vertically. Fortunately, because you've completed this game and mapped it all out, you know what the solutions are in advance. Oh, and the cursor always starts at the same location (we will assume (0,0), the upper left origin).

Given these constraints, write a solver that takes the fewest number of cursor moves to complete each puzzle.


Good luck! If you require hints, feel free to poke me by private message or by commenting here. Oh, and do feel free to use your work to post a video of the speedrun.

A Challenge

May. 7th, 2011 03:50 am
goldkin: i has book (Default)
22:19 <Shiveneve> so you shared this Snargar the Friendly Dragon thing
22:19 <Shiveneve> from the onion
22:19 <Shiveneve> you must now have someone draw it

I like this idea. Is there anyone out there I can bribe to make this a reality?

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