Post for: #code ^{(11 Posts)}

Facebook has a series of puzzles they use to evaluate potential engineering employees or for the enjoyment of anyone curious. I've worked through quite a few of them and in the process learnt that I really need to brush up on my algorithms. At the moment I'm working through Dinosaur Island which is an AI exercise which surprisingly is about dinosaurs on an island. You need to create an AI that pilots a species of dinosaur to…

I finished Dinosaur Island managing to exceed the score required to 'win'. Silliosaurus, most majestic of the Imbecephalosaurians thrived on Dinoisland unperturbed by the predators and rocks and only occasionally abandoning their herbivorous tendencies to engage in cannibalism (5th on the high score chart with 315,000 points). This success lead to overpopulation which created an evolutionary pressure that spawned Crazyodon which rose to a level of glory only seen by 3 previous species (4th on the…

I am a fan of author Warren Ellis. He writes comics like Doktor Sleepless which has some interesting information warfare themes along with mad science and you should all check it out. Doktor Sleepless incidentally, is where I stole the cool warning signs that grace my first couple of entries here. Warren Ellis is a strange, strange man. He has a very popular twitter account (over 300,000 followers) where he does the usual twitter things but in…

Sometimes I end up in conversations with people that leave me with an undeniable urge to prove my point, generally only to myself. Last April I had a conversation along these lines that left me writing a piece of "malware" that communicated via Twitter and since by the time I'd finished the conversation was no longer relevant and so I just let it sit there. Later last year I wrote a paper about Web 2.0…

There are a lot of bad websites out there and visiting one can do bad things to your network. There's plenty of technologies that try and detect bad pages and block or filter them but the problem is that they're imperfect. There are other solutions like whitetrash that only allow you to visit sites that are listed as good (whitetrash is awesome, go play with it). The problem is creating the list of what sites are…