Janko in a Jar

I saw the news on techcrunch about seedcamp’s 20 finalists. There is a table below and I went scanning it with my brain’s ’search_the_table_column_for_string(1, “Slovenia”)’ function.

The function returned null but triggered the warning at last row - “realtionship detected”. Ok, I stopped the execution and ran the function ‘myfuzzydb_get_by_keyword(”zemanta”)’ and I got this back…

“zemanta is a 3.0 company where that young guy from TV is in and they made odprti kop and I was just at the next table in a bar last weekend when we meet my cousin and she didn’t know how to order an ordinary 0.3dl beer and it was fun and we had to walk like mad to the car twice to pay the parking lot, and he made odprti kop in django - python”

The point is… One of the finalists is from Slovenia. Congratulations! I saw their Diego Maradona demo and it is cool..

The third activity Qubi Slide has started working today. Two html based activities are in plans now. When we make around 7 activities we will contact a very good artist and I hope he will make a very nice user/website interface.

Swap, Slide and Draw were made with haxe, backend is php mysql, Flash comunicates with the backend via SoTinyRPC. Backend php is made with library Pulp


(this below is playable so press the buttons)

I am no scientist in AI, AIML or NLP but I am bit of a practitioner. Around 4 years ago I made a bot “Robotek Robi” with Python.

It used PyAIML and custom server made with Twisted Matrix that talked in XML to the Flash front-end. It was for website otroski.net (eg. kids.net).

A cute robot was looking at the cursor and chatting to you in natural Slovene language. To my knowledge it was the first AIML bot talking in slovene lang. Now the “tax department” has the (I presume AIML) bot named Vida with which you can chat about your tax formalities.

But imho there is actually no AI in AIML. AIML is

• a LOT of hardcoded text
• a clever and good use of recursion to “reduce” the complexity of input
• a very practical approach to solve the specific problem that quite works
• no AI

AIML shows one interesting thing… human dialogue in basically very shallow and doesn’t loose all that much if it’s reduced to simple action-reaction without any deep memory and structure.

Robotek Robi went to a vacation one day and never returned. I lost a server with root access so I couldn’t run it. After a year the “legend” formed in o.n. community that there once was this nice and very smart robot there that you could really talk to. But the fact is that when Robi was active 30% of chatting ended up with “oh ..you are so stupid”

I am no experienced Lua-er. But I got very intrigued after the first “aha” moment happened to me: “aha, so lua is like some super-table language?”. That is of course not all, and many more aha-s did and will follow.

I love minimalism and this is a minimalism at it’s best!

Just some random code to confuse you:

function makeHiSayer(name)
  return function()
    function sayHi(name1)
      print("hi, I am " .. name1)
    end
    local n = name
    sayHi(n)
  end
end
hi = makeHiSayer("janko")
hi()
-- hi, I am janko

from Wikipedia: Although Lua does not have a built-in concept of classes, the language is powerful enough to easily implement them using two language features: first-class functions and tables. By simply placing functions and related data into a table, an object is formed. Inheritance (both single and multiple) can be implemented via the “metatable” mechanism, telling the object to lookup nonexistent methods and fields in parent object(s).

In next example I am not using any of the proposed methods for doing OO in Lua. Basically I am just making stuff up as I go and yet it works.

AmIABulletClass = { x = 10, y = 20, dx = 1, dy = 1,
  update = function (self)
    self.x = self.x + self.dx ;
    self.y = self.y + self.dy
  end }
bul = AmIABulletClass
bul.update(bul)
print(bul["x"])
-- 11
print(bul["y"])
-- 21
bul.update(bul)
print(bul.x)
-- 12
print(bul.y)
-- 22

I really suck at doing bureaucracy stuff even in my home country. Now I am signing a contract with a games portal from US but before I can do it, I must fill in the W8BEN (Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding) form… but the catch is that to fill out W8BEN I must first fill out another form to apply for TIN (Taxpayer Identification Numbers) send it to IRS in US and wait X weeks to get a TIN assigned… uh.. I’m loving it…

Qubidraw got the first game.. It’s called swap and it was the most popular at old KUBI. “Slide” will come next.

The visitor behavior shows me we are stepping in the right direction.
(this below is playable so press the buttons)

My writing to this blog seems like shit when looked from the distance. I have a theory that nobody is interested in my everyday thoughts, but I need some outlet to notify the “world wide humanity” of what new I have made and where they can find it (in which everyone is wildly interested).

So I end up not writing anything for a month and then stuffing 4 quick announcments into one post. And now that I thy to look back at what I have written and it’s all totally confusing and has no rythm.

So I decided to write more often in shorter posts, with 1 topic at a time. And I would

And this theme is clumsy!! I like minimal themes (what you are looking now is the new theme)