Suggestions/ideas for the RPi programming contest

willrandship

For those who haven't heard: Raspberrypi.org is holding a programming contest. Only 18 and under, though. (Barely made it in Very Happy

)

Rules are pretty simple: Must be all your own work (minus open-source libs and such, and within reason) and it has to run on the rpi. It ends in september, entries start in august.

I'm currently at a loss for ideas. I want to make an evolutionary dubstep generator bcause it would be awesome, but I have no idea how to do genetic programming. Razz

Any other thoughts?

Oh, and I do have a RPi, so hardware-based things are not out of bounds.
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seana11 · Last edited by seana11 on 14 Jul 2012 08:01:33 am; edited 4 times in total

merthsoft · File Archiver Joined: 09 May 2010 Posts: 2735

I think you should do something that interfaces with the calculator. I don't know what, though.
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Shaun

seana11 · Posted: 12 Jul 2012 05:07:33 pm Post subject:

Ashbad · Posted: 12 Jul 2012 06:04:41 pm Post subject:

Make a supercharged pixel art/index painting raster editor!
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-Ashbad

willrandship · Posted: 12 Jul 2012 06:13:32 pm Post subject:

Porting something wouldn't go so well, since all the code should be written by me. I'll look at that genetic programming tutorial. I really want to try that Razz

Especially after I saw that HaD article where a genetic algorithm made an FPGA that used magnetic flux Razz

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KermMartian · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 10:55:24 am Post subject:

I'd say that you should make it be a gCn bridge, but the Raspberry Pi is way overkill for that sort of application, if a simple Atmega 328 could do the same thing, as long as it has a network connection of some sort. I'm glad that you read that FPGA article; I thought it was some amazing work. Although seana11 and I don't always see eye-to-eye, I actually like the idea of a generative process for dubstep creation.
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willrandship · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 11:00:24 am Post subject:

I think seana's main complaint is the general dislike of dubstep, not the idea of generating it.

Another idea I've been thinking about for a while is a programming language that uses low-level assembly-style commandss and memory access, but has a generic enough syntax to be used on different processors.I'm thinking of basing it on GCC as an include file so any missing functionality could be supplemented by the "universal language". The include file would have to be different for each architecture, but it shouldn't be too terribly hard, just a lot of #defines.
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KermMartian · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 11:01:54 am Post subject:

Sounds to me as if you just re-invented Java's bytecode. Wink

But it sounds as if your proposal is for something lower-level even than that, which might be interesting.
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Tari · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 11:02:51 am Post subject:

willrandship · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 11:04:18 am Post subject:

well, it's not going to be a VM, unlike both of those. It would compile to native assembly.

Wait, LLVM isn't looking like a VM....confusing. And it doesn't look like a language either.
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Ashbad · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 11:42:42 am Post subject:

Tari · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 12:15:12 pm Post subject:

willrandship · Posted: 13 Jul 2012 12:27:00 pm Post subject:

Ok, that sounds really cool. Very Happy

I also saw that it supports python as an input lang...

Anyways, I still need ideas, since I probably won't be able to learn enough about signal processing and genetic programming before the deadline.
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seana11 · Posted: 14 Jul 2012 07:41:05 am Post subject:

willrandship · Posted: 14 Jul 2012 07:32:32 pm Post subject:

I think I hit on the perfect idea. It fits with the RPi foundation's goals (some nice brownie points) should be completable by the deadline, and most importantly, it's within my current skill range. Razz

I call it the ERF: The Extensible RPG Framework. It's a framework (no rly? Razz

) of python scripts and modules that lay out the basic necessities of a classic RPG. It's going to be structured such that users would modify the existing scripts to add new stuff. Not only is that more efficient, it encourages more internal probing and modifications.

I'm also releasing it under its own Open Source license, written by myself. Tell me what you think! I'll edit in a link to the license in the next few minutes.

Edit: And here's a pastebin. Criticisms and suggestions are welcome.

Link
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seana11 · Posted: 15 Jul 2012 06:56:12 am Post subject:

Ashbad · Posted: 15 Jul 2012 06:59:30 am Post subject:

Tari · Posted: 15 Jul 2012 10:32:31 am Post subject:

Agreed with the other assessments (I couldn't be bothered to compose a response before). It seems like the MPL is close to what you want.
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KermMartian · Posted: 15 Jul 2012 04:13:08 pm Post subject:

Ashbad: For what it's worth the buy-me-a-rootbeer license is sometimes referred to as the WTFPL, and BrandonW uses it frequently. Seana11: Although the Pi does indeed have GPIO, it has shockingly few of them for a board that's meant to teach hardware hacking, in my opinion.
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