project_idea

I meant one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillator_(CA)

So cells keep dying and being born forever, yet the game is stable.

Thanks, these are very nice ideas, especially the API for agents. I'd like to build this sometime, as it should be really fun to play... There are some issues in gameplay that I couldn't figure out yet, though. for example running until completion could be quite hard to detect, as there can be oscillators with a long period. Also, not sure if the board should be circular, to allow re-entry or not... I was thinking whether players can place their cells anywhere or just in their own restricted "corners" of the board. My main concern however is whether the whole thing would be predictable enough to allow some sort of strategy or it would just be too chaotic... I also sent you a private message if you'd like to discuss...

Thanks for the encouragement... yeah I really have to build something, "waiting for an idea" doesn't really work...

the visualization in the first link looks indeed very close to what I was thinking about although it also shows how hard it is to make a clear plot with ~100 nodes. I wonder whether it would be interesting to see something like this in real time with visitor activity.

Eastern Europe...

Thanks, you are right that I wasn't specific enough and I agree about impressive degrees and such, basicly that's why I quit grad-school :). I would say I have decent coding skills and good knowledge of machine learning, computer vision and related theory, as well as the hacker's hubris of not being afraid to start working on anything, no matter how hard it seems, with the hope of 'picking it up' on the go. Also the timeframe is difficult to specify, because one hopes to start a hobby project that turns into a lifetime of work (as Linux did for Linus for ex.)... Obviously if it becomes self-sustaining, it's perfect, if not, it can be done on the side with a day-job or such...

Here are some random ideas I thought of but not pursuing at the moment:

- a device for blind people that would give some description of the visual scene (using simple camera, for ex. read any text that is currently visible, or just describe somehow what is on the image so that it helps imagining it)

- a static site engine (cms): just generate the site as static pages in a compilation stage with a simple templating system

- an online two-player game based on Conway's game of life (two different colors, when a new cell is born, it takes the color of the majority of the neighbors, in each round the players can add a number of cells in a certain part of the board, goal is to wipe out other color)

- software for modelling paper airplane folding (improving designs, etc.)

- a wrapper around sqlite to make it work as client-server

- a zooming GUI that can be used on websites

- a framework for designing flexible layouts of webpages, so that they can be changed with a few parameters, which can afterwards be optimized automatically to have best conversion, etc.

- an art history game where player would see a small portion of a painting and would have to guess artist, age, technique, etc.

- a visualization for website visitors logs, where nodes are different pages, edges are the links between pages and a poster that shows the most frequent visit scenarios on the website

- a visual image search engine without textual queries, where one just starts by browsing a small set of images and picks in what direction to move on

- etc.