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AI as puppetry, and rediscovering a long forgotten game.
AI in games is a hot topic at the moment, but most examples of this are attempts to create human-like behaviour in characters – a kind of advanced puppetry. These characters are also generally designed beforehand rather than reacting and learning from player behaviour, let alone being allowed to adapt in an open ended manner.…
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Mongoose 2000 in the wilds of Uganda
One of our most ambitious projects: Mongoose 2000, is now up and running after 6 months of testing. This is a Raspberry Pi and Android tablet system to synchronise and store masses of data for a long running behavioral experiment recording the activities of packs of mongooses in the field site in Uganda. They broad…
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New camouflage pattern engine
One of the new projects we have at foam kernow is a ambitious new extension of the egglab player driven camouflage evolution game with Laura Kelley and Anna Hughes at Cambridge Uni. As part of this we are expanding the patterns possible with the HTML5 canvas based pattern synthesiser to include geometric designs. Anna and…
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Training teachers in coding, and thinking about e-waste/recycled robots
We recently had the second inset training day in programming related activities at Truro school. Following on from the previous session I didn’t want to introduce too much new stuff, so we concentrated on going back over Sonic Pi and Minecraft/Python programming in the morning, then discussed a lot more about our future workshops in…
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Cricket Tales – scaling up
Work on cricket tales the last few weeks has been concerned with scaling everything for the sheer amount of data involved. The numbers are big – we’re starting with the footage from 2013 as a test (a ‘smaller’ year), where 145 cameras recorded in total 438 days worth of video of cricket burrows. Our video…
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Picademy Exeter and Future Thinking for Social Living
Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and…
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Quipu sonification experiments
Following on from our session last week on Quipu sonification, Julian and I wrote a blog article with some audio on the weavecodes project site about trying to understand these undeciphered Inca hard drives with sound.
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Hungry birds 2 – the citizen science edition
One of the three citizen science game projects we currently have running at Foam Kernow is a commission for Mónica Arias at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, who works with this research group. She needed to use the Evolving butterflies game we made last year for the Royal Society Summer exhibition to help…
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Coding with knots: Inca Quipu
This week I’m teaching at IMM Düsseldorf with Julian Rohrhuber which has given me a chance to follow up a bit on Inca Quipu coding with knots, a dangling thread from the weavecoding project. Quipu are how the Incas organised their society, as they had no written texts or money – things like exchanges (for…
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Weavecoding Munich
Ellen’s exhibition in Munich was always going to be a pivotal event in the weavecoding project – one of the first opportunities to expose our work to a large audience. The Museum of casts of classical sculptures was the perfect context for the mythical aspects of weaving, overlooked by Penelope and friends with her subversive…