The Game of Life
A few days ago I was getting bored and decided to to something fun. Yes, you can get bored at TUDelft… Well, actually you don’t get bored, you get sick of all the work you have to do (apologies to anyone offended by this). So in a quest of something fun but still productive I found Conway’s Game of Life.
Game Of Life
The Game of Life is not really a game because no one plays it. It is a cellular automaton, a zero player game in which the only human interaction is the initial setup. Then the game evolves by itself under the constraint of some rules, until it gets to a stable state.
The game’s world is a 2D grid in which each node is a place that can hold one individual. Each individual can be dead or alive. Basically you can see the world as a black, white grid in which black represents living individuals and white dead ones (the figure on right).
Each grid represents a single generation. In order to get a new generation the current one must evolve. This process implies that every individual (dead or alive) node will be evaluated and, based on the result, will survive, die or resurrect. The evaluation function takes in consideration the number of alive neighbors a node has (a node can have up to 8 neighbors):
- If one individual has less than two neighbors alive, it will be dead in the next generation because of underpopulation.
- If one individual has more than three neighbors alive, it will be dead in the next generation because of overcrowding.
- If one individual is alive and has two or three neighbors alive, it will survive in the next generation.
- If one individual is dead and has three neighbors alive, it will resurrect (be alive) in the next generation.
That’s all. Based on this transition, each individual gets from one state to another, from generation to generation. There are two situations in which no more changes will be made between generations:
- All individuals are dead.
- All individuals are in a stable state from which they cannot die. The square on right is a stable population that cannot change because all alive individuals have two or three neighbors and all dead individuals have at most two neighbors alive so they cannot resurrect.
The fun part was to implement this myself. I created a small MFC application that is able to load files with predefined configuration or to generate random populations up to 10.000 individuals. If you download the sample be aware it will crash if you load invalid files and do strange things – it is just a prototype.
Software That You Should Install
Here is a list of what I recently installed or I plan to install. It is a list of software (updates) that you might consider useful:
Windows Vista/2008 Service Pack 2
It was released a few hours ago for general audience and it brings some important fixes. I think is a must-have. It is a must have and now can be downloaded through Windows Update.
I have just installed it through Windows Update. It took about 30 minutes to complete (download + install).
Visual Studio 2010 Beta
The lastest version of the well known IDE brings a lot of new features: editor completely written in WPF, a more eye candy user interface, .NET Framework 4 (dynamic types for C#, named parameters, implicit values, etc.). It is available for free and you can download either Professional or the Team Suite edition (I recommend the last one).
Office Mobile 6.1 Upgrade
GeekMeet Brasov #3
We are happy to announce the third GeekMeet meeting in Brasov, Romania.
We learned a lot from the previous two events and we made some significant changes:
- Sending e-mails in order to join was not a good idea because e-mails are hard to synchronize amongst the organizing team. Now there is a form that must be filled in order to join the event.
- We are collecting some data in order to improve future events. We want to know what attendees want to see on GeekMeet.
- We are trying to bring important speakers from major companies like Adobe or Apple.
Up to now we have three confirmed speakers: Laura Bularca who will talk about “Game Dev”, Mihai Dragan who will talk about “Research si creativitate” (Research and creativity) and Cornel Creanga from Adobe who will talk about “Rich Internet Applications”.
The event will take place on Saturday, May 30 in Okian library, Brasov.
For more details check the official announcement.
To register to the event fill this form.
You can also follow us on Twitter.
Free C# book
RedGate is offering for free download the ebook “Illustrated C# 2008″.
This book is interesting for beginners because it has a lot of drawings and diagrams that explain better the concepts described by text. It could be used by persons migrating from C++ or VB to C# or it could even be the support material for a course.
In 730 pages the author, Daniel Solis offers a very visual approach – with lots of figures, diagrams and code samples – that will help you get to work with C# fast.
Go here to download your copy.
GeekMeet Brasov #1 – Cloud Computing
DISCLAIMER: This post contains Romanian words – sorry for those who do not understand them.
Yesterday I attended the first GeekMeet presentation from Brasov, Romania. It was pretty exciting because I was one of the speakers.
My general impression about this event was good. The organizers did their job well, with little mistakes – mistakes are inevitable for the first event :). The presentations were nice too; there were six:
- Mihai Gheza – “SEO Kung Fu”
He told us about SEO and what can we do to improve it. - Victor Hurdugaci – “Cloud Computing – Lumea din nor”
My presentation. - Maria Diaconu – Agile, Scrum, XP
A 30 minutes workshop about the basic idea behind Agile methodologies. - Claudiu Gamulescu – “eCommerce – Analiza de Criza”
A presentation about the effects of crysis on electronic commerce - Vlad Georgescu – “Design Related”
Some general design related topics. Actually this presenation started an intresting debate about speculation and employment. - Bobby Voicu
Bobby’s presentation did not have a name. I will copy what Mihai said, Bobby’s presentation was a “friendly preaching”.
Mihai already uploaded his presentation. When the others will follow him I will update their links.
My presentation can be downloaded by click the following link: cloud-computing-geekmeet-2009-03-28. It is about cloud computing, mainly focused on Microsoft Windows Azure. Because there were no feedback form – unfortunately – I want to ask my visitors who attended the presentation to give some feedback (as a comment or by e-mail at contact [at] victorhurdugaci [dot] com).
I am still waiting for pictures. When some will be available I will upload them here.
See you on GeekMeet Brasov 2 (April 25 – same place, same hour).
My Spore Creature
[Wikipedia] Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse video game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.
That’s what I am playing :D
See below some pictures of my evil (aggressive, carnivore) creature just before the Tribal Age:
Half an Hour Puzzle Solved
Here I promissed that I will post a picture of the Half an Hour Puzzle solved. Sorry but I forgot to do that.
Better late than never:
New Features in Office Live
Microsoft introduced a new set of features in Office Live. 
For those who don’t know what Office Live is: Office Live is like a lite cloud version of Share Point. It enables users to store, organize and share documents.
There are four new big features:
- Support for folders. Now the workspaces can contain folders in order to help us organize documents. I am really excited about this feature because I have also requested in through the feedback form. I am using Office Live a lot and I needed folders and subfolders.
- Cut/Copy/Paste. Now Office Live provides support for cutting/copying documents and pasting them in another folder/workspace.
- Increased storage space. The storage space increased to 5GB. That’s a looot. If you don’t think so just try to see how many word documents can you store in 5GB :)
- Eight new languages. The new languages also include Romanian (personally I prefer English but there are other who prefer their native language. The new languages are: Hungarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Serbian Latin, Ukrainian, Slovak, Latvian and Slovenian.
Best hosting?
Many people asked me about hosting and where should they host websites.
When I created this blog I’ve spent a few days searching the Internet for the best offer. What I found (and bought) was the Basic Plan from Lunar Pages.
For just $4.95/month they offer:
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| Microsoft® FrontPage® Extensions | Included |
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| Parked Domains | Unlimited |
| CGI-BIN | Included |
| FTP Accounts | Unlimited |
| Online User Statistics | Included |
| Apache 2 | Available |
| Shell Access | Available – $2 per month |
| Ruby on Rails Support | Included |
| PHP Support | Included |
| PERL Support | Included |
| PYTHON Support | Included |
| SSI – Server Side Includes | Included |
| Customizable Error Pages | Included |
| Customer Account Page | Included |
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If you want to access Lunar Pages in order to see their offers and/or buy hosting follow this link.
Live Mesh – Synchronizing Life
Great commercial: