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 | As Programming Challenge 8 was a bit too tough (no one entered it!), I've simplified it a lot and rehashed it as Contest 40. It's about working out the best poker hands from 7 cards, details below. Contest 39 has been very popular but I should have the last four entries (of 13) marked soon after you read this. Last week Google revealed a better image format than JPG but about 39% smaller on average. Details on WebP below. Have a great week, the greatest yet! | |
CRobots Still Going after 25 years
 Like Corewar, CRobots is one of the classic programming contests with a bunch of robots in an arena, programmed in a stripped down C like language. Each robot is trying to outfight the rest. It was first released in 1985 by Tom Poindexter and was derived from an earlier game RobotWar that was created in the 1970s and appeared on an Apple II in 1981. Sadly the source code of the Compiler and Virtual Machine is not available though there's plenty around for the robots themselves. There are a number of variations and one is a game engine (for Linux) called C++ Robots though it's written in C and compiled by the GNU C++ compiler. If I had time I would love to write a C#/SDL version of the C-Robots interpreter and combat executer. Using that combination would let it work on Windows and Linux. Any takers?
| What is WebP?
WebP is a new lossy image file format from Google. It won't be the first new image format, the last successful one was PNG. There was also JPG 2000 but after the GIF submarine patent issue in 1995 the worry about possible patents has effectively killed it. Microsoft mentioned JPEG XR a year or two back but it's now got to be a non-runner I guess. WebP is different as it comes from Google and they have open sourced it and made it completely free to use unless you try to sue Google. They tested the format by re-encoding 1,000,000 existing web images, mostly JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, and got a 39 per cent reduction in average file size. JPG is such a ubiquitous format that it will take I guess maybe 5 years for it to be replaced by WebP. There's a gallery page showing side by side comparisons. Sadly there's no comparison of Lena Soderberg as it's a copyrighted image and the full image is NSFW! This was a famous 1972 Playboy image that is claimed to be the most often used in testing image algorithms. WebP is so new that it will take a few months for WebP support to get into browsers, with Chrome most likely first and then possibly Firefox. WebP is bitstream-compatible with VP8 (the Google Video Format) and uses 14 bits for width and height meaning that the maximum file dimensions for WebP are 16,383 x 16,383 pixels. There's a 40MB file of examples as well as 1.2 Mb of C source code which includes the converter. Currently this is Linux only but I expect Windows along soon.
| Project Mono Continues to Grow
The current stable release is 2.6.7 but the release list for 2.8 offers .NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 compatibility (amongst many others). If you're unfamiliar with Mono, it's an open source platform and implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. In short, it's .NET/C# for Linux, Mac and even Windows, not to mention Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3, and Apple iPhone! (Jailbroken I'm guessing or via Monotouch etc). As well as a Base Class Library there's a Mono Class library with support for Gtk+, Zip files, LDAP, OpenGL, Cairo, POSIX etc. Interestingly the to do project list for Mono reads like a final year student or post graduate list of study topics. But summed up, if you want to contribute to the Mono project these are the general areas they need help with: - Write documentation.
- Write regression tests.
- Complete the implementations of the class libraries.
- Help fix the bugs filed in their bugzilla database.
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