The 6.370 BattleCode programming competition is a unique challenge that combines battle strategy, software engineering and artificial intelligence. In short, the objective is to write the best player program for the computer game BattleCode.

BattleCode, developed for 6.370, is a real-time strategy game. Two teams of robots roam the screen managing resources and attacking each other with different kinds of weapons. However, in BattleCode each robot functions autonomously; under the hood it runs a Java virtual machine loaded up with its team's player program. Robots in the game communicate by radio and must work together to accomplish their goals.

Teams of one to four students enter 6.370 and are given the BattleCode software and a specification of the game rules in early January. During January, each team develops a player program, which will be run by each of their robots during BattleCode matches. Contestants must master artificial intelligence, pathfinding, distributed algorithms, and network communications to write their player. At the final tournament, the autonomous players are pitted against each other in a dramatic head-to-head tournament. The final rounds of the tournament are played out in front of a live audience, with the top teams receiving cash prizes.

This year we are holding two tournaments. One for MIT students only and one for anyone who wishes to participate. For more details on the two tournaments, see our tournaments page.

6.370 is a great opportunity to learn to program or hone your skills further. We provide lectures on relevant topics to the BattleCode competition. While we do not provide extensive resources on basic programming skills, we may be able to point you in the right direction as you supplement your learning with hands on experience in the competition.

Simulated robot destruction. Now w/ lasers!

--timball

BattleCode

We are collecting information about hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different digital devices. This information is essential for everyone who wants to analyze insights of modern computer hardware, explore ways it s works, design devices with computer connection.

Our handbook includes more than 1000 documents :

* Pinouts of computer hardware components, internal connectors, buses and input/output ports i.e. PC Serial port pinout, PCI Bus .
* Pinouts and brief information about some common computer hardware interfaces such a RS232 interface, USB, ATA/IDE .
* Pinouts of audio/video connectors i.e. S-Video connector or VGA connector pinout
* Pinouts of cellular phones, consumer audio/video hardware and over devices i.e. Nokia Pop port pinout
* Schemes of computer peripherals and other devices cables and converters i.e. USB to RS232 serial converter schematic
* Layout and numbering scheme of common and device-specific connectors

All documents are free and available online in english and russian languages.

Ever need pin-outs for some wacky device? Unsure how to wire your particular flavor of "serial"? Wanna crunk together your own ipod dock? These russians got the right idea. As w/ all products of the sirius cybernetics corporation, "share and enjoy".

--timball

Handbook of hardware pinouts, cables schemes and connectors layouts @ pinouts.ru

Abstract: In this paper, based on a weighted object network, we propose a recommendation algorithm, which is sensitive to the configuration of initial resource distribution. Even under the simplest case with binary resource, the current algorithm has remarkably higher accuracy than the widely applied global ranking method and collaborative filtering. Furthermore, we introduce a free parameter $\beta$ to regulate the initial configuration of resource. The numerical results indicate that decreasing the initial resource located on popular objects can further improve the algorithmic accuracy. More significantly, we argue that a better algorithm should simultaneously have higher accuracy and be more personal. According to a newly proposed measure about the degree of personalization, we demonstrate that a degree-dependent initial configuration can outperform the uniform case for both accuracy and personalization strength.

I "personally recommend" this paper for reading.

--timball

[0711.2506] Effect of initial configuration on network-based recommendation

As warrantee I am about to use this webpage to void my warranty.

--timball

Upgrade Your MacBook Pro s Hard Drive

DOMinatrix is, well, incredibly awesome. It's a full automated SQL Injection tool written in JavaScript, which will dump out data from MS SQL Server databases (more to come). I'm be demoing DOMinatrix at my Black Hat presentation.

XSS + Web worm + DOMinatrix = oh crap.

In the last 5 months we've seen the development of web scanners and SQL injectors in JavaScript.

These aren't a browser exploits.
These aren't buffer overflows.
These aren't something that affects only a single browser and only on pages that don't explicitly set a character set.

This is using JavaScript in perfectly valid ways to do extremely malicious things.

There is no way to patch this.
End users are pretty much screwed.

Here is a screen shot of DOMinatrix in action.

DOMinatrix - The JavaScript SQL Injector

I have consumed a massive amount of Red Bull in the last 2 weeks in a run up to finishing the manuscript for my Ajax Security book. We are talking on average 2-3 a day, with an occasional day of 4. Once there was a day of 5. Just once, and *never* again. At some point you can't really call them "days" anymore. A day is simply a convenient unit of 24 hours that may or may not start at 12:00am.

There is an elusive euphoria stage of Red Bull consumption where you are unbelievably productive and yet task that seemly take hours take only about 27 minutes or so. That was the odd thing. It always seemed 27 minutes later. I like to call this stage "Fry-Time" in reference to that Futurama episode where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee and time slows to a crawl. Fry-Time occurs only in a narrow band on the line between total exhaustion and caffeine-induced heart attack and is a difficult stage to reach. I've hit Fry-Time maybe 3-4 times ever. 2 of those times have happened in the last 2 weeks.

Then, there is the "attention deficient disordering" stage. This stage occurs beyond Fry-Time and before the caffeine-induced heart attack phase. In this phase, you want to be productive. You are aware of all the work you need to accomplish as well as its importance. You feel motivated and excited about all your projects. In fact, it feels like you are in the Fry-Time stage. But you aren't. You are ADDing. Because as soon as you try to do something. You can't. Halfway through your brain jumps to thinking about another task and you stall. Its like OS scheduler that has so many jobs to do it spends all it time context switching instead of actually making any progress on any of them. This is an extremely frustrating phase because you know what's happening. And the very act of noticing that you are being scattered brained brings to mind all the tasks you still need to do which makes you think about how cool some of them are and suddenly you aren't doing any more work on whatever it was you were working on. You've context switched to another job.

The only thing to do in the ADD stage is wait it out and try to be productive later. The only problem is when you are in the ADD phase you have had so much Red Bull you can't sleep! So you are wide awake, too hyped to do anything, knowing you have shit to do, and losing time that you could be sleeping.

This is exactly what happened to me around 4:00am this morning. On an upside, I got through about 60 pages of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Elonka's cousin sure can write!

Taming the Bull

Shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results. Clicking links in the article will trigger new Google searches, making it a very useful research tool...

Shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results. Clicking links in the article will trigger new Google searches, making it a very useful research tool.

** Like Googlepedia? Please donate at www.amusd.com **

Everyone asks me "How come your google searches do that cool thing w/ wikipedia?" Well this is the plugin that does all the magic. It gives the user a +2 wisdom modifier, but a -4 in credibility.

--timball

Googlepedia :: Firefox Add-ons

Vonage sucks. Right now April 19th, 2007 vonage has experienced 5hrs of a self described "network upgrade" to "improve service". It seems that current levels of service are "none" to "bullshit". This includes 911 service. Which put all their customers out of touch with emergency services via the vonage network. The Ts&Cs shouldn't indemnify Vonage Holdings (LLC) of putting their customers in danger.

Of course they could be verizon trouble too. Or they are the target of a DDoS attack. Perhaps some evil villain is using this downtime to rob poor aunt May of all her (what brands does aunt carry?) See Spiderman 3 to find out that and more... (sponsored by vonage our shares aren't worth crap)

Vonage - A better phone service for less

Welcome to the alpha version of Many Eyes!
View your data, ask questions, and share your discoveries.
Harness the collective intelligence of the net for insight and analysis.

/me has evil data to plot

Many Eyes

I clicked a link for hot judicial action and I got 0wn3d. I'd like to thank the academy, my parents for warping me, Tom and Nick for letting me do this, and my hero Acidus.