Four short links: 17 August 2017
Implementing Compression, Eliminating Humans, Mapping NES, and Classifying Defects
- On the Implementation of Minimum Redundancy Prefix Codes — a paper that shows all the curls and challenges of the real world, instead of the idealized handwaving that’s pretty much everywhere else. (via Fabian Giesen)
- Eliminating the Human (MIT TR) — David Byrne digs into the idea that modern tech is mostly about reducing need for human interaction. When interaction becomes a strange and unfamiliar thing, then we will have changed who and what we are as a species. Often our rational thinking convinces us that much of our interaction can be reduced to a series of logical decisions—but we are not even aware of many of the layers and subtleties of those interactions. As behavioral economists will tell us, we don’t behave rationally, even though we think we do. And Bayesians will tell us that interaction is how we revise our picture of what is going on and what will happen next. (via BoingBoing)
- Automatic Mapping of NES Games with Mappy — We describe a software system, Mappy, that produces a good approximation of a linked map of rooms given a Nintendo Entertainment System game program and a sequence of button inputs exploring its world. In addition to visual maps, Mappy outputs grids of tiles (and how they change over time), positions of non-tile objects, clusters of similar rooms that might in fact be the same room, and a set of links between these rooms. We believe this is a necessary step toward developing larger corpora of high-quality semantically annotated maps for PCG via machine learning and other applications.
- IBM’s Defect Classification System — for when you get devopsessive. (via Ryan Betts)
