So much to talk about.

But first, an apology. This past week has been… well I won’t say bad necessarily. I feel it is enough to say that, roughly speaking, I spent 13 hours a day at school. Not unheard of, certainly. And not even unheard of for folks who commute a fair distance. But definitely unusual. So I’ve been busy, to say the least

I know I spoke last post about the plethora of people who were ill, and I reiterate that message now, not because of those same people, but rather – unfortunately – because a new group of people have been suffering from some fairly significant medical problems. So again, to all those folks, I wish them speedy recoveries.

And now, academia.

Final projects were due at the end of last week, and that was, for the most part, where I was / what I was doing. For one of my classes we had to design and implement (in Java) a program that would not only generate mazes at random but would also solve those same mazes. The generation part was quite interesting: it involved data structures called graphs that would be able to represent something as relatively unorganized as a maze. But the coolest part, to be honest, was the solution part. It involved backtracking, which is best described in the terms of a maze. Basically, the program walks through the maze, and when it hits a dead end, it just backs up and goes somewhere it hasn’t been before. If it can’t go somewhere it hasn’t been before, it backs up more.
And that’s essentially it, from a conceptual perspective.
The picture that follows is a maze I just generated (each is random) and the dotted path is the solution.

Game programming also required a final project, and for it our professor decided to allow us to design our own game and implement it (with some requirements – he has to grade it, after all). For mine, I decided to create a game where you flew around in an Asteroids style ship and shot lasers at other opponents. Basic concept. But the twist is that you can create these things called wormholes, which not only allow you to travel at double speed when you create them, but also – once they’re created – drag any player that comes too close to one of the endpoints along the length of the wormhole.
Long story short, it’s pretty nifty, even though wasn’t able to complete everything I wanted to.
The first screen shot is the start screen, the second is from playing.

On the Cardinals On Wheels front, we met with Finance Committee the Thursday before last, and it went quite well. If you don’t know / if I have forgotten to mention, Finance Committee is a group of students responsible for allocating the student activities budgets to student organizations. That said, it seems to be that student organizations look at Finance Committee, in the good case, with a wary eye, and almost always nervously. In the worst case, I think its very possible that some student organizations feel they have an adversarial relationship with Finance Committee, as if they have the cash and it’s an uphill battle to get any out of them. However, when we went up before the Committee, (we being four members of COW’s executive board – a fifth was sitting elsewhere in the room) we kind of just chatted. Spoke of the events on our budget, spoke about reasonable changes to our budget that would make everyone happy. As my advisor would say, instead of merely believing we has to divvy up a fixed set of resources (a pie, if you will) we expanded the pie. So all went well, and we have some really cool events coming up next term, including a trip to Medieval Times, Anderson’s Japanese Gardens, the Second City comedy club, and more!

Finally, on a more personal note, the Saturday before last two friends and I attended the Distant Worlds Concert, which is part of a world tour of Final Fantasy music. This of course tells you how incredible of a nerd I am, but I really love the music (and have been playing the games for what, fourteen years now?). I was really lucky to be able to go. I even was able to see the composer, which was pretty much ridiculously amazing.

Yeah folks. It is kind of like that.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 7:13 am and is filed under Finals, COW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.