Friday, January 28, 2005

Illusion


No its not moving...

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Unite


Clicked on a Sony VX-2000 some time back, Lit using a fluorescent tube light.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

The Prisoner's Dilemma

You are a criminal, and you and your partner (for whom you have no feelings one way or the other) have committed an crime. Unluckily, you've both been caught, and you're being held in separate cells in a jail, with no way to talk to each other.
The crown attorney comes to talk to you, and says he's willing to make a deal with you. He's also offering the same deal to your partner, and you both know that. He says, "We have some circumstantial evidence on both of you, and if neither of you tells me anything we can still get both of you a year in jail, the way things stand right now. But - if you confess, and admit your partner was with you, then we'll let you off scot free because you were helpful, and he'll get three years in jail. Of course, if he confesses and you don't, then you're the one who gets the three years and he walks free. Now, if you both confess, then we've got you both dead to rights and you both get two years in jail."
The crown attorney leaves and goes back to his office, after telling you he'll be back in half an hour to get your answer. What do you do?

You can either "co-operate" with your partner - not confess - or "defect," and confess. If you defect, you either get 0 or 2 years in jail, depending on what your partner does. If you co-operate, you get either 1 or 3. Clearly, defecting is the better strategy.

Of course, the other fellow is thinking exactly the same thing. And when you both defect, you guarantee yourselves two years in jail. If only you had both co-operated, and gotten only a year! But if you co-operate and he defects, you get three while he goes free ...

This is the dilemma. Both people, by following their "best" strategy, do worse than if they had used another, apparently illogical plan.

This is something that I had observed in one of the StarTrek epsodes where Data is playing a game of chess and chooses to draw the game where the other player was only thinking of winning.. this was negating all the moves the other player was making and then forced him to make a mistake. on the other hand if the other player would also have tried to draw the game ,, there would be better result for both of them.. Interesting...

Friday, January 21, 2005

Viewstation


Testing out my new Macro filter on my camera...

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Back Home

Finally I am back home. Its been a long journey back home by train sitting for 24 hours doing nothing is boring which got me to think that if teleportation would exist then we could have reached places probably at the speed of light but then what would this journey be like..
When we travel by bus or train or even fly there is a nice view that we can see there are nice sunrises, sunsets, trees birds, people etc, what would happen if our body was just transformed into some form of energy and then transmitted as radio waves or something and reassembled somewhere else, what would we see? This speed of travel would make us want to travel longer distances then, like to another planet or another Galaxy, that too would probably be a real long boring journey without a view of the planets, the stars the nebula's.. .

Monday, January 17, 2005

In Mumbai

I have been in Mumbai city for the last few days attending a wedding ceremony of a relative.
I am in this net cafe here where people are still using Internet Explorer 5 this sucks, no popup blockers, no tabbed browsing, my gmail is not working this just sucks.

Will be leaving for Bangalore in a few hours time.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Smokey


Another Render in Max today... Was just in the mood to try something out and saw a photograph of a scene like this. Thought of trying it out in Max

Wanna Play?


Rendered in Max using raytraced reflection maps and one light source... Made for a Physics Engine Tutorial.

Robot Makers Say World Cup Will Be Theirs By 2050


"By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of football’s World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that" - Shu Ishiguro, head of Robot Laboratory in Osaka

This is amazing.. I have always been fascinated by the RoboCup since I saw it on a program called Scientific American Frontiers hosted by Alan Alda on the National Geographic channel, this was about a year and half back. Here is the article reporting that Japanese can build a robotic team that can win the Football World Cup by 2050 independently of human input, making its own decisions.

Breakthrough In JPEG Compression

The makers of Stuffit have written a program that compresses JPG's by 30% that is by doing a lossless compression over a JPG file.They plan a new Stuffit Image Format (SIF). Here is the Whitepaper.
With companies coming up with higher storage space I wonder how much of a use is compression for Images atleast..

Gamers Are Human

A new study by the Entertainment Software Association reveals that, amazingly, gamers are regular human beings. The study shows that avid game players are just as religious, artistic, and social as anyone else. This after people said that games like Doom were responsible for the Colombine shooting massacare...

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Amateur Computer Entertainment Expo

The second edition of the Amateur Computer Entertainment Expo (ACEE) will be held on April 9th 2005. Like on its first edition, ACEE will take place in the Department of Informatics Engineering of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
Heres the link for more information

Monday, January 10, 2005

Hi

This is my personal Blog...