Just a quick post to highlight some recent media coverage about the XBox 360 being used to research heart disease. The article suggest that Simon Scarle used – you guessed it – some of the graphics hardware in the console.
Using The XBox 360 For Heart Disease Research
October 8, 2009
No Comments » | 
games, video games | Tagged: games, heart research, Simon Scarle, video games, XBox 360 | 
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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Apple open-sourced libdispatch
September 17, 2009A quick note to point out that Apple recently open-sourced libdispatch, which is a library providing Grand Central Dispatch.
Here is Apple’s introduction to Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch, and the ars technica writeup on GCD.
Note that this isn’t the kernel or compiler support code. However, it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
No Comments » | parallelism | Tagged: Apple, Grand Central Dispatch, libdispatch, multicore, open source, parallel, parallelism | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
NxBRE Project Seems To Have Gone Dormant
September 1, 2009Not sure why I didn’t spot this before, but it appears that the NxBRE project (a .NET rule engine) has recently gone dormant. Cheers to David for all the work he put in over the years.
1 Comment | .NET, AI, rules | Tagged: .NET, Microsoft, NxBRE, rule engine, rules | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Big Data
August 6, 2009There is a nice article from Adam Jacobs in the most recent CACM magazine entitled “The Pathologies of Big Data”. Jacobs discusses the fact that it is often easier to put data into a database than it is to get data out, as well as strategies for improving how we work with large datasets. It’s an interested read.
No Comments » | datamining | Tagged: big data, databases, datamining | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Learning To Play Mario Bros.
August 6, 2009Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy have organized a competition to create an agent (or AI) that plays the video game Super Mario Bros. – or, more accurately, Infinite Mario Bros. a tribute game featuring random level generation.
The advantage of using Infinite Mario Bros. is the random level generation – which can let the agent learn more generalized playing tactics rather than tactics that are tailored to a static set of levels as in Ms. Pac-Man or Pitfall.
I look forward to seeing the results of the competition, and hope to see source code published as well.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, games, machine learning, Mario, Ms. Pac-Man, Nintendo, Pitfall, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Direct3D 11 Compute Shaders
August 4, 2009In other news, the upcoming Microsoft Direct3D 11 will feature compute shaders. If I read correctly, this is shipping in Windows 7. NVIDIA is already out promoting the compatibility with CUDA. Apparently, this technology is also sometimes called DX Compute.
No Comments » | datamining | Tagged: Cuda, GPGPU, Microsoft, multicore, NVidia, parallel, parallelism | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
A Survey Of Programming Video Cards For Other Purposes
August 3, 2009The August 2009 issue of ;login: from USENIX has a nice article on programming video cards by Tim Kaldewey entitled “Programming Video Cards For Database Applications”. Sadly, the article is only available to USENIX members until August of 2010.
Kaldewey surveys the past and present of programming video cards for non-graphics purposes – from the early days of using the graphics APIs to fool the GPU into thinking it is rendering graphics when it is really performing a general-purpose calculation, to the present era of general-purpose APIs such as CUDA.
He also shows a back-of-the-envelope calculation for building out a 100 teraflop data center using 100 GPUs versus 1400 CPUs, including power consumption differences.
If you are a USENIX member, the article is a good read. Sadly, it won’t be current when it finally becomes freely available.
[The same issue of ;login: also has a nice article by Leo Meyerovich: “Rethinking Browser Performance“.]
No Comments » | datamining, hardware, parallelism | Tagged: Cuda, datamining, GPGPU, Larrabee, multicore, parallel, parallelism | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Farewell To Popfly
July 17, 2009The official Popfly blog states that the service is being shut down.
I’m a little sad to see a neat mashup tool get shut down. The integration with Silverlight and the ability to use the Popfly widgets on the Windows desktop were unique features.
I wish the best of luck to the Popfly team in their next endeavors.
No Comments » | datamining, Microsoft | Tagged: datamining, mashups, Microsoft, Popfly, Silverlight, Yahoo Pipes | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Netflix Prize May Have A Winner
June 29, 2009The Netflix Prize has entered the 30-day notification period as a team has announced that they have achieved a 10.05% improvement over the original Cinematch algorithm.
Some further background on the contest can be found in a nice writeup in Wired from last year.
No Comments » | AI, datamining | Tagged: AI, algorithms, datamining, machine learning, Netflix | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
A Computer That Plays Pitfall
June 29, 2009From Rutgers university comes a learning algorithm that they have applied to playing the Atari 2600 game “Pitfall!”.
An example video is on YouTube.
One of the research papers is apparently here (although the site isn’t being very responsive at the moment).
I’ll get around to posting on machine learning for Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man at some point as well.
(Spotted on Kotaku and GameSetWatch.)
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, Atari 2600, games, machine learning, Pitfall, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
