It took some time, but I have finished the Minimax player. I've tested it and it seems to be unbeatable, as you would hope. The main reason it took so long is because it is pretty slow, at least in the original naive version. The code for the version I am discussing is tagged blog-928. … Continue reading Noughts and Crosses part 2 – the Minimax Player
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Noughts and Crosses
Hannah Fry was the presenter of this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. There were some beautiful demonstrations (in my opinion) on several mathematical subjects that have relevance in the real world. The demonstration of how vaccination is effective using the zombie apocalypse was very thought provoking as was the Christmas present detection machine, which was … Continue reading Noughts and Crosses
Accessing Resources from Test Cases in Swift
This is just a reminder from me to me. I constantly find myself searching through my previous projects trying to remember how to do this. Putting it in my blog might make it easier to find it in future. Quite often, when writing test cases, I want to access resources that are not Swift code. … Continue reading Accessing Resources from Test Cases in Swift
Sharks and Fish(es)
Prologue When I was much younger I used to read Scientific American. In those days, it had a regular column by AK Dewdney called "Computer Recreations". Eventually, several of his columns were compiled into a book called "The Armchair Universe" of which I had a copy, but I suspect my parents donated it to the … Continue reading Sharks and Fish(es)
Quasicrystals in Metal
I recently had my attention drawn to the blog Main is Usually a Function which was discussing the art of creating quasicrystals as computer images using fairly simple rules. The blog in question uses Haskel to create a solution and rendered the result as an animated png. The author seems quite pleased he was able to … Continue reading Quasicrystals in Metal
Time for a C64
Now I've mastered Metal (ha ha), I think it's time to build an emulation that's a little more complex. It's time for the Commodore 64. Yay! Had some thoughts about how to do this. The extra challenges that I see are: the banked memory. I will need to be able to swap the RAM/ROM banks … Continue reading Time for a C64
Metal Addendum
In my last post, I discussed how I used Metal to render the PET screen instead of the higher level Cocoa APIs. I did the minimal amount of work to make the changes, so the program actually worked very inefficiently. The 6502 has no separate IO space so all peripheral control registers are mapped into … Continue reading Metal Addendum
