As you can see from the screenshot above, it’s not the conventional Rubik’s Cube that we see everyday. It’s more of a number puzzle where you have to arrange the numbers into ascending order using a set of predefined moves. Nonetheless it’s still challenging to do, particularly the GUI and AI subsystems.

There are some command line arguments that you can use. Just type “rubik.exe -help” in the command line console to see them. Note that the programme requires a text file with the numbers in it to run the puzzle. There are no specific format for typing the numbers. Just remember to leave a space between each number.

The AI algorithm for the automated mode isn’t optimized in this version. As such it’ll need to run up to an hour on a modern computer to complete a 10-step puzzle, which is the hardest difficulty. 6 steps will probably need less than one minute though. Keep in mind that the AI searches for the shortest solutions which in academic study is more important. I can do a brute force hit-and-run method that saves a lot of time but also produces redundant moves. So is this only what I can do? Of course not. Guess what, I produced another algorithm that can solve even the hardest puzzles under one second!

From one hour to one second.

The problem with my AI algorithm is efficiency. There are a lot of redundant instructions and dependent data to go through. Not satisfied with that, I redo the code in my spare time for two weeks, going through several versions. Each faster than before. The speedbreaker that did it in 0.5 second? Did it in half hour. It was a brain fart cum eureka moment.

You must run the programme in command line console. You have to include the file’s name as command line argument, ie. “rubikdevcpp2 filename.txt“. No source code is include because it’s easy to be plagiarised.

Download turbo auto-solver (no name for it) here.
Download [2D]RubikSolve here.

1. First stop is the sequel Valve’s popular zombie shooter Left 4 Dead which will come out on November 17. This time the story is set in New Orleans. The characters will be different, so are the weapons which I suspect. There’ll be melee weapons like chainsaw, baseball bat and even frying pan! Well, it’s logical to be “hands on” when dealing with those mindless hordes.
   
   




2. We can’t forget the game that brought the most powerful gaming systems to their knees, EA’s Crysis. Last we left our hero in the monkey suit, he’s on a VTOL aircraft heading back to the alien infested island, reminiscent of a certain game’s “finishing the fight” motto. Details of Crysis 2 are sketchy, but expect more advanced rendering techniques that’ll test the generation hardwares’ abilities. (There’s a certain movie coming out soon that features similar monkey suits too. It’s called G.I. Joe.)
   
   




3. Fans of Splinter Cell series (including me) will be pleased to know that Conviction will be release this year, finally. Strangely enough, the release date is the same as the zombie killer mentioned earlier. I haven’t played Double Agent yet. Hopefully I’ll get down to it this coming holiday (whole month of July if you’re my friend and wish to hang out).
   
   




4. While Fallout 3 isn’t new to every gamer out there, the upcoming new DLC’s are. They are Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta. Yeap, more quirky yet epic stories. Just the way Fallout series are. I’ve played all of the DLC’s so far, and I ain’t going to miss these.
   
   




5. Halo is considered an Xbox franchise though the first two of the series were ported to the PC. I’m going to mentioned it here because Master Chief (an even cooler name, John-117)  is one of my favourite heroes and all badass heroes are called John. John Rambo, John Connor, John McClane, John Wayne, etc. You might know that Halo: ODST is coming this year. Well, there’s another surprise for this year. Halo: Reach is announced. I think it might involve the units in UNSC though there’s a call sign for a Spartan unit in the trailer. Sure hope there’s a movie to be made about this franchise. It’ll be very very cool.
   
   




6. Another game worth mentioning is Modern Warfare 2. You might have seen the trailer. I’m reiterating here just to emphasize the Best Game of The Year potential. Here’s a gameplay trailer for you to salivate.
   
   




7. You know what Koreans like besides kimchi and Rain? That’s it. It’s Starcraft! If you think local DoTA addicts are too “addicted”, there’s no better word to describe the Koreans. Thus, it’ll be a monumental job to come out with a sequel to the game that’s already been worshipped like a god. Blizzard is doing just that, releasing bits and pieces of a game that’s beautiful to look at and fun to play with. It’s coming this year, if the programmers are satisfied.

I think that’s all for the lineup of the games that I think you should play for this year. Sure there are some others like Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, what I’ve stated here are the ones that will definitely worth playing. Other series like Star Wars are more of hit-and-miss so I’m not making decision of it for now. We’ll leave unexpected hits for the time to come. Until then, start saving money for the games and decide what upgrades you’ll need for your PC!

My first serious attempt at C programming, which was also my first semester’s assignment. Admittedly, I had no concrete knowledge of C prior to undertaking of this huge task at the time. The lecturer was not adept at teaching, though I really admired the MIT graduate with Ph.D in medic. So I had to learn the basics from scratch and by trial-and-error for more than two months, somehow developed this piece of perfectly choreographed code. It was hard work and stressful because a single mistake could mean hours of troubleshooting. However it’s also interesting at the same, like designing the school magazine. It take a bit of creativity to produce the perfect algorithm to perform a task as fast as possible. Doing just that and seeing it run is very satisfying.

This programme is designed to read a text file containing land surveyance data and show the data graphically. The data contains soil depth, colour and strength of different holes drilled in various coordinates. Sounds easy, but I had to write an equivalent of 400+ line essay without a single grammar mistake. But that’s nothing compared to what I wrote for my current assignment which has 1000+ line. Professionally made software has millions of line of code. Of course we can’t compared that to the effort of an amateur coder. I won’t publicize the source code just in case someone decides to plagiarize it. This is a good problem for programming assignment. However, comments and enquiries are welcomed.

You can get the programme here. When asked for the file, just type the name of the file included with the extension, i.e. “boreholes.txt”.

Some of you might have heard of crowning the Witch. It’s approaching the Witch closeup, I mean CLOSEUP and blast her in the face with the auto shotgun. Of course you have to it do before she starts to get aggro.

Since I had killed a Tank myself, the adrenaline and craziness that lingered from that episode was enough to drive me to crown a witch. I switched off my flash light as not to provoke the Witch instantly. I just approached her directly and got very near when she started growling and turning her head around. So I just panicked and shot her a few times. Boy, that was fun! You should try it!

The Witch doesn’t get aggro easily without the flash light so take it easy. I had some REALLY CLOSE encounters before, like looking into her eyes as she stared up just next to me. I just backtrackked quickly without shooting. I hadn’t heard of crowning back then. The Witch just looked at me as I backed away then resumed crying. The lesson is don’t be afraid of her. You can run just by her if you don’t want to confront her. She would growl for a while then get back to her ‘chore’.

I haven’t seen many people crowning the Witch but it’s very easy. You might need some loose screws in your head to do it though. Have fun!

In CES ’09, NVIDIA announced the GTX285 and the dual-GPU GTX295 using 55nm GT200 chips. Mind you these are optical shrinks of the original 65nm versions which are more than twice the size of AMD’s RV770 chips. Even after shrinking it still is almost twice as big as its competitor. Though AMD’s RV770 is (much) smaller, it’s more efficient, cooler and ALMOST as fast. This sort of situation forces NVIDIA to bring down prices of GT200 cards that may cut into production cost. AMD can sell two RV770 with the price of NVIDIA’s one GT200. That means AMD could have twice as much profit than NVIDIA. Size doesn’t matter after all. NVIDIA may have won back the performance crown, but AMD made more money. David still beats Goliath, right?

The G92b Identity Crisis

This month, NVIDIA released the GTS 250. It’s only a twin of 9800 GTX+ with different. I don’t say you shouldn’t buy it. It’s just that consumers should be better informed of companies renaming products for exploitation.  AMD just reduced the price of the 4870 to match GTS 250′s. Take my word, buy the Radeon, it’s much faster. After all, it was design to compete against the GTX260.

Cheap 4GB DDR3 At The End Of The Year

Kingston demoed their 24GB DDR3 Core i7 system last month. 6 sticks of them, 4GB each in single sided configuration. Meaning we’ll have 8GB double sided DDR3 soon. Most new systems next year will be loaded with 8GB DDR3 in dual channel. Don’t bother if you don’t play games.

RV740 Preview

3DGuru previewed the first 40nm GPU from AMD, the RV740. Impressive? Hell, I might buy it if it wasn’t for the impending release of Windows 7 and DirectX 11. Still don’t understand the need for GDDR5 on it though. AMD still wins this round of GPU war.

Intel vs. AMD: x86 License Battle

It’s all over the net. Find it yourself. Personally, in view of maintaining marketing competition and to make everyone  happy, Intel might have to close one eye on this. AMD’s weapon is the people.

Next month…

We’ll see the rise of the RV790 a.k.a. Radeon 4890. And also Intel introduces faster Core i7 CPUs, with AMD following suit with the Phenom II 955 at 3.2GHz.