I have provided, here for family and friends who are interested, some projects/events in my life recently. I will attempt to update it with some degree of frequency. If you don't know me/don't care about me then this will likely seem mundane... so go away... you'll get more jollies elsewhere.
Theorem: If the measure of a man is who he knows then everyone's measure is equal.
Another update... finally. I've been doing a number of interesting things. First and foremost is that I've been working with my orbital algorithm off and on for a long while now. It is now to a point where it produces print quality images with an arbitrary number of orbits. I've done a couple posters and they have been received well.
The images produced are amazing in their simplicity and the seemingly human touches. I've got hundreds of them... that's the problem when you teach a computer how to generate interesting images... it just doesn't stop.
All of the images are produced using the same algorithm, the only difference is the numbers that are used. Colors are independent of the algorithm. The relationships between the numbers are what create the interesting paths of the lines. Factors such as the distance to the least common multiple, common factors and size are all used to generate the visual relationships in the image. It's a pretty cool algorithm, which is probably why I've been constantly returning to it for the last seven years.
Since my last update I have moved to Washington, DC., and now work at a think tank dealing with issues of defense and security. The District is an interesting place. The people here have a different mindset than I'm used to and are very much oriented toward paper-based success.
Another algorithm I've developed is a method of using markov chains on images. This produces images that use the flows of colors from a source image but produce blankets of color instead of a coherent image. Using a popular piece as a base I produced this:
The trick is to guess what was used. Most people get it quite readily... because the strokes in the image are quite similar. The algorithm can also take in multiple images and produce a combination of the colors.
These two images were combined in the algorithm to create:
The slight diagonal lean is produced by a bias in the method I use to sample the original images. It should theoretically be possible to remove this bias, but I haven't found a method that doesn't use far too much memory (storing the matrices for this is a rather intense process since it's 2-dimensional instead of the single dimension used by most markov systems).
Here are some pictures generated by an algorithm I wrote sometime this year (don't actually remember when).
I reimplemented an algorithm I wrote in High School. It was supposed to provide smooth, seemingly random, looped paths based on a deterministic equation. Basically it just produces cool images. Here are a couple more: ring2.png smoke2.png wave.png wave2.png cylinder random balanced random balanced and zoomed random
So I guess today is shortly... ah well. I've been studying for the Math GRE lately and just took it on Nov. 12th. I think it went pretty well. I didn't ace the thing... but that wasn't really expected. Now for the regular GRE on Dec. 1st and the Putnam on the 3rd. And applying to graduate schools.
I've done two more presentations since I last updated. The first was on algorithms for drawing cubes. The second was on modular encryption. I used Beamer for both of these presentations which created the nice pdfs you can download by clicking on the presentation subjects. Both presentations don't require much background knowledge and besides... they're pretty... so take a look if you're interested.
I'll add some more content here shortly... I'm not being a very dedicated blogger.
Yep... it's a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional cube analog (generally referred to as a hypercube). You can think of it this way: you know how you can draw a cube on a piece of paper... even though the piece of paper is flat? This is similar to that... but from 4d into 3d. I made this for a presentation I'll be doing next Tuesday (the 20th of September) on an analysis of a method of drawing cubes. ... That's right... I'm a nerd.
