Finally an update!

What with work / projects / email / spore, updating the web site has definately taken a back seat recently. The good news is that I have answered every email I've been sent so if you haven't received a reply the chances are my spam filter ate it - just resend or post a comment here if this is the case.

On the project front - have a look at this screen shot...

[caption id="attachment_299" align="aligncenter" width="286" caption="721 Spheres and 2 lights with 1 level of reflection at +- 14fps"][/caption]

I am actually really happy with this as having 8000 objects on the screen only drops the frame rate to +-9. I can still make a lot of optimizations to it but the basic algorithm seems to be working well. Soon it will be time to switch back to triangle meshes and render something useful :) I've recorded a short video of it which is available here , unfortunately the screen capture application I use to generate the recording dropped the frame rate by +-6fps...  At the start of the recording I turn reflections on and you will see the (already diminished) framerate drop accordingly. Note that the camera isn't moving - all the objects are moving.



The nendrils project is coming along nicely and looks like the network will someday be able to learn decently. Backpropogation is just so limiting / slow in a parallel environment and seems so unnatural that I've been working on better learning functions for it. At the moment its web site just links here but it will get its own site one day :)

I haven't been playing spore as much as I would like but still well worth sitting down to from time to time. Parts of it are a bit frustrating - I'm still not entirely sure how to take over another city... (perhaps read the manual?  never! :p  ) I still recommend it to anyone thinking of buying.

As to the suduko challenge - I will post more soon (famous last words) The current problem I'm working on for it is that some puzzles have more than one solution and my current solver only spits out the first one it happens upon...  so much work to do as so little time....