Veni, vidi, vinca

For those who are not technical, skip the gray portion.

I have begun to write up a PC version (that is personal computer, not politically correct (I don't think that anything in the game is not politically correct as it is (although I am not quite sure that I would change the game even if it were politically incorrect))) of dancing robots. I have not had a huge amount of time to do so, but it is still moving along to some extent. I suppose that that means that I have to post my neural network code online to fulfill my promise from earlier.

I am not entirely happy with the code because it takes forever to train. I haven't yet figured out how to prevent it from eating up all of the memory when asking it to train for a long time. I tried an IRC channel for advice, and though they tried to be helpful, I didn't get an answer that was better than "Rewrite it from the ground up and pray that it doesn't happen again".

Here are the class files:

/NeuralNetwork/Neuron.hs, and NeuralNetwork.hs.

Here are some programs that use them.

/MakeNN.hs, ShowNN.hs, TrainNN.hs, RunNN.hs, and ToleranceTrainNN.hs.

If anyone who is good with Haskell looks at them and can determine what exactly is causing ToleranceTrainNN to eat up all of the memory when run against recMov.txt with the following commands:

./makeNN.exe tol.in.nn -1 1 19 30 9

./toleranceTrainNN.exe tol.in.nn tol.out.nn recMov.txt 5.0 0.1

I would be very appreciative.

We have been working in our yard a bit over the past few days. We found out that the goats will eat dandelions if you pick them and feed them to the goats, but they will not under any circumstances eat vinca (periwinkles), which is probably a good thing because it is a very hearty plant which we are considering seeding our entire front yard with. They also have fairly pretty purple flowers.

I also found a mushroom in the front yard. I have yet to complete an identification, but I am thinking that it is not going to be edible.

The goats have been pushing their heads through our current fence and damaging it, so we are going to put up a new chain link fence. Between that and watching gage, making a new faux goat Parmesan, and two barbecues that we have been invited to this Saturday it is looking like something will have to give.

Also, I got a spoon caught in the food disposal. I can't get it out, so it looks like I will be taking it apart some time (and perhaps installing a new disposal, or even a new sink as well.)

For mothers day I made the Poulson Broccoli Cheese soup (which is apparently different than the Brown Chicken Cheese Broccoli soup in that all of the ingredients are different.) It was well received, with everyone having multiple bowls and all of the girls saying that it was good (One of Sara's few words).

Sara and Rea both are enjoying the warm spring weather and loving being able to spend a lot of time out of doors. They have a water table that they love playing in (which necessitates a lot of clothes washing due to the dirty nature of being wet out of doors.)

Rea decided that when it was summer we would pick a lot of raspberries and make raspberry juice. (the way that she told me that was so cute that I wish I had gotten it on camera.) It sounds like a good idea... perhaps we will have to do it.

We opened up a faux goat Parmesan yesterday, and after 9 months of ageing it was delicious. I put in three different starters when I made it so it had a very complex flavor. I also dried it quite a bit, so the edge of it was riddled with cracks. Look for it at a future family dinner.