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Showing posts with the label project

Teaching a robot how to vacuum clean with genetic algorithms!

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Pt En < change language In this post I want to showcase the beginning of what I think will be a really cool project. After reading a really nice book (that Bill Gates himself recommends) on machine learning, I decided to experiment with genetic algorithms. For that matter, the main goal here will be to develop a genetic algorithm that teaches a vacuum cleaner how it should move in a dirty room to clean it in the best way possible (that is what is happening in the animation above). The first step is to define what I mean by room : a room will be a rectangular grid where each cell has a number from $0$ to $1$. A cell with a $0$ is perfectly clean and a cell with a number $1$ is as dirty as a piece of floor can get. Below we see a $5\times 5$ room with a robot (in red) already in the middle of the room: As I read in The Master Algorithm (and frankly I found it very enlightening), when one is going to use genetic algorithms we must previously define the structure of the solutio...

Random maze generation

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Pt En In this post I just want to share a simple algorithm that I used to create random mazes. The idea came from an e-mail I got, about a past competition, where one of the contestants did this exact thing: a program to generate random mazes. I saw the animation of the program working here and I deduced how to do it. All the code can be found on GitHub , as well as an executable of the program, the animations from the beginning and end of this post, an image of a bigger maze, and this other animation: where you can see a different style of maze; a less straight one. The maze starts in the top left red corner and ends wherever the other red square is, which need not be on the bottom right corner. The algorithm is simple: travel randomly inside the black area without ever hitting a white path; whenever no random move can be made, start going back until you find a place where the path can branch out again. While we are creating white paths, keep updating the final position to be ...

Tutorial on programming a memory card game

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Pt En Este post vai ser um tutorial, não muito detalhado, sobre como fazer um jogo de memória com Python e pygame. O jogo que vamos implementar é um jogo comum: viramos uma série de cartas para baixo e temos que as virar duas a duas, tentando encontrar os pares. Claro que quando viramos duas cartas que não são um par, temos de as voltar de novo para baixo. Quando estou a criar um jogo, gosto de o ir desenvolvendo por etapas funcionais: partir o processo em várias fases que representem pontos nos quais eu tenho algo que posso testar. Deste modo, não só o processo se torna muito mais interessante, como posso ir controlando o aspeto do que estou a produzir. Deixo de seguida uma lista das etapas que eu pensei para este projeto; cada ponto da lista descreve a funcionalidade que o jogo já suporta: Criar um ecrã onde mostro todas as cartas dispostas, face para baixo; Clicar em cima de uma carta faz com que ela se vire para cima; Clicar na segunda carta verifica se encontrei um par ou não ...