Happy New Year!

The image is not mine, but I really liked it. Happy New Year to All of you!

Automatic Update Of Moles References To Other Solution Projects

The situation: I have a solution with several projects in it. One of them is UnitTest project, that uses Moles for mocking. And it has referenses to other projecs in solution as well as to their moled dlls. Every time I change code in my projects and rebuild them, the UnitTest project loses the references to moled dlls, as they allready have other versions. I see that Moles builds new versions of projects' dlls, but it does not update references. Why?

RTFM, Juri.

From the Microsoft Moles Reference Manual (page 12)

The Moles framework for Visual Studio monitors build events and automatically forces the regeneration of stub types for projects that have been updated. For efficiency reasons, this automatic update only works for .moles files that are in the top level folder of the project, to avoid walking large nested project structures. This automatic update creates a smooth experience when writing code in a test-driven development style.

So the automatic update of references works only for .moles files that are in the same folder with the project file. But I have moved all the .moles files into separate folder.

Now that I moved all the .moles files back, it is working.

Solution: Eee Pc Ubuntu 10.10 Wireless Connection Fail After Resume From Hibernate

After upgrading your Ubuntu to Maverick, you may have experienced some problems using wireless networks. That is when your computer resumes from hibernate, it is no longer able to connect to any wireless network and only a restart will make it do it again. Also some random disconnects from wireless occur. That concerns not only Eee Pc (I have a 1000h), but I believe every computer that uses RaLink network controller. First, check if it is you :)

$ lspci -k|grep -i network --after-context 3
03:00.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2860
Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. Device e002
Kernel driver in use: rt2800pci
Kernel modules: rt2800pci, rt2860sta

With Ubuntu 10.10 some hardware that was previously driven by the rt2860sta driver is now driven by default by the rt2800pci driver. Sometimes the new rt2800pci does not work as well as the rt2860sta. In that case it is often possible to switch back by blacklisting. As we already saw, we have both drivers installed and the pci one in use. Now we will create a text file that will allow us to easily switch between the drivers.

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-wlan.conf

Copy these 2 lines into the newly created file.

blacklist rt2800pci
#install rt2860sta /bin/false

And save. After the reboot your computer will use the rt2860sta driver. If you want to switch back to the rt2800pci driver, just comment the first line, uncomment the second and reboot.

PS. Solution was found here

SICP: The 8 queens puzzle

The Google AI Contest is over and now I continue to read the SICP book. Now we are solving the famous 8 queens puzzle. One way to solve the puzzle is to work across the board, placing a queen in each column. Once we have placed k - 1 queens, we must place the k^th queen in a position where it does not check any of the queens already on the board. We can formulate this approach recursively: Assume that we have already generated the sequence of all possible ways to place k - 1 queens in the first k - 1 columns of the board. For each of these ways, generate an extended set of positions by placing a queen in each row of the kth column. Now filter these, keeping only the positions for which the queen in the kth column is safe with respect to the other queens. This produces the sequence of all ways to place k queens in the first k columns. By continuing this process, we will produce not only one solution, but all solutions to the puzzle. We implement this solution as a procedure queens, which returns a sequence of all solutions to the problem of placing n queens on an n×n chessboard.

In the beginning we are given this procedure.

(define (queens board-size)
  (define (queen-cols k)
    (if (= k 0)
        (list empty-board)
        (filter
         (lambda (positions) (safe? k positions))
         (flatmap
          (lambda (rest-of-queens)
            (map (lambda (new-row)
                   (adjoin-position new-row k rest-of-queens))
                 (enumerate-interval 1 board-size)))
          (queen-cols (- k 1))))))
  (queen-cols board-size))

and we need to write all the sub-procedures that are used by the main one. Let's start from the simplest one.

(define empty-board '())

Next task is to write the safe? function. This should determine for a set of positions, whether the queen in the k^th column is safe with respect to the others. I decided to split it into three procedures. 1 checks the horizontal line, one diagonal up and the other diagonal down. We don't actually need the k argument, as we should always check the last queen only. I use reversed-positions as we are starting from the last queen and going to the first one.

(define (safe? k positions)
  (let ((reversed-positions (reverse positions))
        (last (car (reverse positions))))
  (and (horizontal-safe? last (cdr reversed-positions))
       (diagonal-up-safe? last (cdr reversed-positions))
       (diagonal-down-safe? last (cdr reversed-positions)))))

(define (horizontal-safe? q positions)
  (if (null? positions)
      true
      (and (not (= (car positions) q))
           (horizontal-safe? q (cdr positions)))))

(define (diagonal-up-safe? q reversed-positions)
  (if (null? reversed-positions)
      true
      (and (not(= (car reversed-positions) (+ q 1)))
           (diagonal-up-safe? (+ q 1) (cdr reversed-positions)))))

(define (diagonal-down-safe? q reversed-positions)
  (if (null? reversed-positions)
      true
      (and (not(= (car reversed-positions) (- q 1)))
           (diagonal-down-safe? (- q 1) (cdr reversed-positions)))))

The remaining procedures are much easier to write. flatmap should join all the lists, that represent queens on board, into one big list. enumerate-interval just returns a list with values between low and high. adjoin-position just adds new queen to the existing ones.

(define (flatmap proc lst)
  (foldr append '() (map proc lst)))

(define (enumerate-interval low high)
  (if (> low high)
      '()
      (append (list low) (enumerate-interval (+ low 1) high))))

(define (adjoin-position new-row k rest-of-queens)
  (append rest-of-queens (list new-row)))

As you can see, there are some parameters in procedures that are not used. They can be safely removed.

(queens 8)

Returns 92 solutions - which is right.

Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

A very interesting article about the ghost AI in the world famous game.

Google AI Challenge. Final.

So the Google AI Contest is over. I have finished in 150 place, which is good, but could be better :).

The winner - bocsimacko - has shared his algorithm and source code in his blog. The same was done by the runner up - _iouri_ - here. As the two best algorithms are revealed, I will not bother with revealing my :) and start with homework - now the task is to go through at least one of them and understand all the ideas discovered and implemented.

I am looking forward to the next Google AI Challenge and this time I will prepare thoroughly to get the high place in it.