The creator of Sodoku Grab for the iPhone wrote a nice post on how the application does the image processing to detect a sodoku puzzle that has been photographed with the iPhone camera. It’s a neat writeup and thought-provoking for other image analysis ideas that can be performed with cameraphones.
Sodoku Grab Image Analysis Postmortem
January 30, 2010
No Comments » | 
games | Tagged: image analysis, postmortem | 
Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Plotting Social Networks (Of Fictional Characters) Over Time
January 30, 2010From the non-academic world, some infographics charting social network interactions over time. In this case, the source is the xkcd comic strip – and the social networks are Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and three other films.
The orcs in the Lord of the Rings graphic are particularly reminiscent of Minard’s Napolean map.
No Comments » | datamining, infographics | Tagged: infographics, visualizations | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
FlowingData’s Best Visualizations Of 2009
January 30, 2010The FlowingData site has recently posted their Best Visualizations Of 2009. Of particular interest is Ben Fry’s work with Charles Darwin’s text.
No Comments » | datamining, infographics | Tagged: datamining, visualizations | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Game Changers
January 30, 2010The latest Wired has an interesting article Game Changers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes. It is a summary of the rise of sports videogames and how the Madden franchise in particular is now having an effective on the actual sport. It appears at this point that most new players entering the NFL have grown up playing the videogame and are bringing certain habits and play styles with them. The article briefly touches on the brain science aspects of videogames by touching on the FPS study that I have mentioned before. The article also does point out that we are not likely see trends such as this except in a few areas such as football and poker.
No Comments » | brain science, games, video games | Tagged: brain science, football, Madden, NFL, This Is Your Brain On Videogames, videogames, Wired | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
A Survey Of Streaming SQL
January 29, 2010The latest issue of CACM has an article entitled “Data In Flight” by Julian Hyde (chief architect of SQLstream). The article is a survey of streaming SQL technology and how it may apply to ever increasing datastreams.
I will also highlight two small items out of the article. The first is an assertion that web application authors are generalists:
The technologies for powering Web applications must be fairly straightforward for two reasons: first, because it must be possible to evolve a Web application rapidly and then to deploy it at scale with a minimum of hassle; second, because the people writing Web applications are generalists and are not prepared to learn the kind of complex, hard-to-tune technologies used by systems programmers.
And second, about 2/3 of the way through the article he finally makes the logical connection to CEP, and throws in an aside about an ongoing religious war. Is this the CEP/Rete debate that I am aware of, or some other debate?
CEP has been used within the industry as a blanket term to describe the entire field of streaming query systems. This is regrettable because it has resulted in a religious war between SQL-based and non-SQL-based vendors and, in overly focusing on financial services applications, has caused other application areas to be neglected.
1 Comment | datamining | Tagged: CEP, Complex Event Processing, SQL, SQLstream | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Graphing The Beatles
January 20, 2010Spotted this week (on waxy.org?), an interesting project that is creating a bunch of infographics using data from The Beatles. I especially like the lyric self-reference graphic.
No Comments » | datamining, infographics | Tagged: datamining, graphics, infographics | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Crayon Color Timeline
January 18, 2010Spotted on waxy.org, a nice visualization of the timeline of Crayola colors from 1903 to 2010. (Unfortunately, the posting doesn’t tell who created the graphic or what software they used.)
No Comments » | infographics | Tagged: crayons, graphics, infographics | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Have You Implemented Backward Chaining On A Microsoft Rule Engine?
January 11, 2010Every so often I hear about a “friend of a friend” who has implemented a backward chaining project with one of the Microsoft rule engines (WF Rules, BizTalk MS BRE). However, the details usually fail to materialize. If you have worked on such a system, or know someone who has – please contact me using the contact form on this blog. I’m interested in understanding more about your project and how successfully the backward chaining implementation went.
(As always – this is mainly personal interest, and does not reflect on any future directions of my employer’s products.)
7 Comments | .NET, AI, Microsoft, rules | Tagged: .NET, AI, backward chaining, BizTalk BRE, expert system, Microsoft, rule engine, rules, WF Rules | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
On Chaining
January 7, 2010One of the recurring topics in the rules world is forward chaining vs. backward chaining – how they compare, when to use one or the other, and which implementations even offer back chaining. I suspect that a lot of the confusion around backward chaining is simply due to the fact that most folks haven’t implemented production-quality systems that make use of it.
One of the forward vs. backward articles is by Dietrich Kappe. In his posting, he includes a quote from Charles Forgy, including the following:
Backward chaining systems are more limited than forward chaining systems.
Dietrich points out that the article was located on the old Rulespower site and disappeared with the purchase by Fair Isaac.
I’m posting here simply to point out that the Wayback Machine has them.
Charles Forgy on Forward and Backward Chaining
I have linked directly to the latest archived version of each article segment. You can find all the RulesPower content that they have here.
For further reading on the topic, the discussions at the following links are interesting (in no particular order):
- Paul Haley on backward chaining using rete
- Paul Vincent on goal-directed event processing – in which he points out that backward chaining was dropped from PRR due to lack of vendor interest
- James Owen on the problems with performing full opportunistic backward chaining on a forward chaining engine
1 Comment | AI, rules | Tagged: AI, backward chaining, Charles Forgy, Fair Isaac, forward chaining, rule engine, rules, RulesPower | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Who Said It? “any backward chaining engine must eventually…”
January 7, 2010I found a quote that James Owen used on the JESS mailing list and I’m interested in learning where it comes from. More specifically, is it in a paper or article somewhere and I’m just overlooking it? My suspicion is that James is quoting Dr. Charles Forgy and that it isn’t published in any articles.
I’ll email James to check the source – but I wanted to highlight the quote here since it was only used on the JESS list and could use a little more exposure.
“Any forward chaining engine can be made to do backward chaining and any backward chaining engine must eventually forward chain to deliver results.”
Updated on January 13, 2010:
James has confirmed (via email) that he was paraphrasing Dr. Charles Forgy here. The comment apparently was made during OPSJ training classes.
No Comments » | AI, rules | Tagged: AI, backward chaining, forward chaining, rule engine, rules | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
