Timecube Rant Generator

I was just goofing around with the Random CS Paper Generator and the Post-Modern Essay Generator and I thought I would take a crack at making my own.

I just finished my first attempt at creating a random Timecube-style rant generator. If you don't know what Timecube is, you really must see it. It's quite the thing.

Here is a typical Timecube rant:

If I tell a human that his 4-corner head (nose, 2 ears and back corner) has only a 1-corner face, the dumb-ass will say to me - "prove it". He knows not that his face is a corner.

Here is a rant generated by my program:

Gene ray is not intelligent. Stay tuned for armageddon. Evil to obama must resign now antiwhite. Time cube students must ignore cube. Time cube is to admit it is proof. Time cube proves you. I am organizing children. Overpopulation is a snot brain to a liar not have 4 is a 360 degree circle.

The program generates random sentences using a Markov model, which treats a sequence of words as a Markov process. The Markov model is trained in advance using a large collection of actual Timecube rants. The first word of each sentence is chosen using another model, which looks at the sorts of words that Gene Ray tends to open his sentences with. There is another model that tries to make sure that each sentence is an appropriate length and ends with the sort of word that Gene Ray tends to end his setences with. I find it ironic that I ended my previous sentence with a preposition.

Looking at a bunch of rants generated by the program, I am only half-satisfied. The good news is that the model does end up ranting about four-way symetry, and frequently employs racist language. The model's biggest weakness is its ignorance of sentence structure. Many of the rants aren't very entertaining because they don't have any sort of sentence structure. Even Gene Ray does adhere to a sort of unconventional grammar, despite the generally incoherent nature of his writing.

Google Artificial Intelligence Contest

Our congratulations goes out to the winner of this year's Google Artificial Intelligence Contest, Alexandru Stan! A big thank you also goes out to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club for organizing and hosting the contest. Full contest results are available here.

In the 2009 Google Artificial Intelligence Contest, participants used both simple and sophisticated AI techniques to create programs that would intelligently play a simple game. The submitted programs competed in head-to-head tournaments to see how they all ranked compared to one another. Contestants could re-submit their code on the contest website as often as they liked, and the online leaderboard was updated once every hour with fresh tournament results.

A screenshot of the hourly leaderboard after the contest had been open for a few days.

The contest was initially supposed to stay open for two weeks, but was extended by another week due to unexpectedly high participation. Almost 300 participants were involved, with about 150 people submitting their entries to the final tournament. The contest webpage received over 50,000 hits from 38 countries. The final tournament took place at the Contest Finale Code Party, held at the University of Waterloo.

Pictures from the Contest Finale Codeparty. Left: the very talented Mr. Jesse Onland serenades some happy coders with his mad banjo skills. Right: some contestants huddle while adding the finishing touches to their entries. Bottom: the contest organizer, Jeff Cameron, with this year's grand champion, Alex Stan.

Done Midterms!

Finally midterms are over! To celebrate, a few of us went out to Kickoff to have a few beers and unwind. We also played a few games of chess.

Random Goofing Around in the MC Building

You can often find us studying and goofing off at the table in the hall outside the CSC in the MC building. Here are some pics of John and Brennan, as well as a video of Mike.

Here is a video of Mike talking to himself while writing some code for his Distributed Computing class. If you listen carefully, you can hear Brennan making a Your Mom joke about overflowing a 32-bit buffer. Only at UW...

Paul Martin

Paul Martin is a very successful politician, and a Canadian hero.  His biggest accomplishment is probably the elimination of the federal Canadian budgetary deficit between 1993 and 1995.  Despite record deficits under Mulroney, Mr. Martin took only two years to rein in government spending and establish a long tradition of budgetary surpluses that lasted more than a decade.  

But that's not why I am blogging about him today.  This blog post exists only so that I can share the following hilarious picture with you.  

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin posing with CSC members Qifan Xi, Jake Parker, Joel, and Holden Karau on No-Pants Friday

Here's the story.  Two days ago it was a regular "No-Pants Friday" in the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo.  Then someone comes along and announces that former Prime Minister Paul Martin is making a surprise visit and will be speaking in a few moments.  Several members of the CSC head out to go see Mr. Martin, not bothering to put any pants on, of course.  This photo was taken after the talk.  

Undiscovered Land

When you were a little kid, did you ever wonder if there was any undiscovered land left in the world? Perhaps if there was a small island that all the explorers had missed, you could lay claim to it, and be the king of your own little country. You could live by your own laws, and you would never have to pay taxes ever again!

I believe that this is an almost universal childhood fantasy. It was roughly the premise of one of my favorite episodes of Family Guy, where Peter creates his own microstate called Petoria and declares independence from the United States.

But as we slowly grow older and wiser, it dawns on us that there is no undiscovered land left at all. If the police can find a few marijuana plants growing in a cornfield using satellites, then surely no one could have missed a decent-sized island for this long. For most of us, this realization is enough to shut down our Regal ambitions for good. But not for Mr. Oliver. Mr. Oliver had a plan, you see.

According to Wikipedia, Michael Oliver is a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States of Jewish descent. He is also a self-made Las Vegas real-estate millionaire and political activist. Mr. Oliver is a staunch Libertarian, and as such believes in totally unregulated open-market economies, free from the scourge of government intervention. Like Peter Griffin, he was sick and tired of paying taxes, and having the goverment telling him how to run his life. One day in 1971, Michael Oliver decided that he had had enough. He was going to start his own country.

The greatest problem was that there was no undiscovered land left upon which to forge his young nation. However, this did not discourage the resourceful Mr. Oliver. Like I said before, Mr. Oliver had a plan. As our story goes, our boy Michael travelled to Australia with a few million dollars' worth of venture capital. He then rented a large barge. Yes, a large barge. He also bought a metric shitload of sand (roughly 2.54 imperial shitloads). Yes, sand. Mr. Oliver then set sail toward a remote area of the South Pacific Ocean known as the Minerva Reef.

The Minerva Reef is peculiar because it is a very shallow reef. It can be seen from the surface, yet it is not close to any other islands. Michael Oliver's plan was this: if thre was no undiscovered land left, he was going to MAKE some undiscovered land. He would then promptly discover it, and then claim it. And that's exactly what Michael Oliver did. He sailed his large barge out to the Minerva reef, and dumped a metric shitload of sand onto the reef. After a lot of shovelling, Michael Oliver succeeded in dumping enough sand onto the reef that a small island emerged from the sea.

Once he had built an island of a few square meters, Mr. Oliver erected a flagpole and a small tower. This new island he christened the Republic of Minerva. He applied to the United Nations for recognition and a vote in the General Assembly. His calls were never returned. It was when he tried to initiate bilateral relations with the surrounding nations that he finally got a response.

About a month after Michael Oliver mailed his declaration of independence to the surrounding states, Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Nauru, Western Samoa, and the Cook Islands sent low-level diplomatic representatives to a small meeting to decide what to do about it. President Oliver was not invited. Eventually, it was decided that Tonga would try to invade the island and take it by force. This actually happened. You can't make stuff like this up.

On June 21, 1972, the entire armed forces of Tonga arrived at the newly created island, accompanied by King Tupou and a brass band playing the Tongan national anthem. They took down the Minervan flag and replaced it with the Tongan flag, and pushed over the small tower. Michael Oliver was not present at the time.

So ended any hope for the most successful microstate in the history of the world.

There is an interesting urban legend that the soldiers that took part in the Minerva War were actually a few dozen unarmed convicts from Tonga. During the brief occupation of Minerva, two of these men apparently got into a serious fistfight, resulting in the death of one of the inmates. This would make the Republic of Minerva the only country in the world to have a murder rate higher than its population. However, it is unlikely that this legend is true since Tonga did have a professional armed forces at the time.

Photo Op

Say what you want about the success or failure of the 1993 Oslo accords. Whether you're critical or supportive, one thing is for sure: they did generate a few very inspiring and beautiful photo ops. For example, check out the following photo, taken after the signing ceremony in Washington D.C.,

For the first time in history, here is the Prime Minister of Israel (Yitzhak Rabin) shaking hands with the Chairman of the PLO (Yasser Arafat). What an inspiring image!

Fourteen years later, George W. Bush has come out strongly in support of a renewed push towards peace in Palestine, and has claimed to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state. This is a refreshing change from his usual unconditional support of Israel's policies, good and bad. We will see over the next year whether Bush's words turn into real material and diplomatic support for political moderates within Palestine.

Bush has also made a shameless attempt to reproduce the beautiful photo ops of the Oslo accords. Check out this photo, taken within the last week,

I'm not saying its a bad thing that Bush tried to reproduce the above photo, substituting himself for Clinton. It's just not as inspiring as it was the first time around.

By the way, the man on the right in the second photo, Mahmoud Abbas, is the same man who signed the first Oslo Accords back in 1993 on behalf of Palestine. This is interesting, since most people believe that Arafat signed the accords in 1993. Although I don't defend every one of his policies and decisions, I think that Abbas deserves all the support that we can give him. Since at least the the 1970's, he has worked behind the scenes for peace and moderation. Unfortunately, he is still way ahead of his time.