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 | Congratulations to Adrian Grigo of Australia for a 57.8 nanosecond speed entry, that's the fastest ever in any programming Challenge and most certainly pushing the limits of my PC. Thanks to both Adrian and Gabriel Dubois for their entries in Challenge 31. Meanwhile Challenge 32 is now underway. Last week also saw the next C++ tutorial published and a C# one is nearly completed. Have a great week! | |
Google AI Challenge - Play Tron
 Tron was a so so film from the early 80s when Computer Generated Images were a lot cruder than today and I believe a sequel is on its way. For the time it had a few Wow moments and it spawned a computer racing game where you and your opponents have bikes that leave a wall behind as you zoom through an entry. You bot must outlast your opponent and not crash because it ran out of space. That game is the subject of an AI challenge at the University of Waterloo in Canada and is sponsored by Google. C++ and C# are among the allowed languages for entries and you can compile the C++ starter package with Visual C++ Express Edition or GCC. The interface is very very simple so even beginners should be able to write code for this. There are a variety of test courses provided in text files and bots (in Java). A C# starter pack will be provided shortly. About the only rule is don't take longer than a second to decide your move. The Challenge runs through most of February and started on February 4th so you can start now. There are already 166 entries so don't expect it to be easy!
| New C++ Tutorial Published
Text files, love em or leave them are a vital part of computing. An XML file is just a text file holding xml data. I regard them as a necessary evil. So this tutorial, with 8 examples shows you how to read and manipulate text files. The last two examples are longer and show how to read a config file to memory and then access it. One version uses pointers, the other vectors. Rather than have 8 different downloads, all source files are bundled up in one zip file. Enjoy!
| How Open Source Spreads out
An open source project starts for one platform, most likely Linux and a few developers are attracted to it and it gets released. However one or two developers also use Windows so they build binaries for Windows and maybe Mac, Solaris etc. The project expands and then the organizers decide to make it cross-platform using Qt or WxWidgets etc. An example- DigiKam. This also fulfills Bolton's 18th law of Computing- If a project name has a K in it, it probably was originally developed for KDE. This powerful software, written in C++ is for managing a photo collection, from reading the raw images from something like 1,000 different digital cameras, storing the photos with all the EXIF data, tracking and tagging photos and then displaying them. DigiKam uses Qt 4 for cross-platform, as since Qt 4 was GPL'd KDE software (using Qt 4) can be distributed to Windows and Mac.
| Never Programmed Before? Start Here
For the complete novice to computer programming. Learn how a computer works and how to control it by writing computer programs.
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