Let’s face it, the internet has allowed people to connect globally regardless of distance and time. You can meet people of different colours, culture and language. Of all the people that you can meet behind the veils of the computer monitors, there are the dreaded idiot, the ones I call the “fire starters” for their tendency to start flame war no matter what.
Browsing through the university forum as usual today, I came upon a thread on dissatisfaction in life. So I posted some statements that are rational and constructive. No harm done, life’s peaceful until that point. The thread starter replied quickly, much to my surprise. What I read next is something you would hear from an idiot. Even people with learning disability aren’t ought to be called idiots, because they never disrespect others! But this person, claiming to be an accounting student started finding faults, twisting words and flamed me for posting some intelligent sentences?! Guess this guy has really lots of dissatisfaction in life. I just rolled my eyes because I’ve met some these idiots once in a while.
Then I posted a reply with lots of “please” and other polite words. No, I don’t want to be like the person who disrespects. An eye for eye and the world goes blind. It would fun though to see how these idiots fare in parliamentary style debate. How nice is it to see them speaking unintelligible in front of the crowd. Back to topic, not surprisingly the idiot replied back almost immediately after my latest message. This time he sounded like a sore loser, reverting to more personal attacks against me. I feel really satisfied at this point. No use counter attacking as anyone can see that the idiot has lost.
When you’re in a public forum long enough, you’ll learn how to handle these idiots. Usually they’ll start a flame war then retreat to obscurity, never to be heard from again. I guess these people learn that the digital space doesn’t appreciate them as much as in real life. There are still certain rules to obey in the internet.
I do admit that I acted like an idiot sometimes, but only when someone went overboard with unintelligent and false statements to begin with. All of these conflicts ended nicely. I apologized and everyone’s happy. As a moderator had told me, emotional is what makes us human. But it is the ability to control emotion and admission to mistakes that makes us civilised!
Thus I end this post with the Vulcan motto, “Live long and prosper.”
[2D]RubikSolve v1.1 and turbo auto-solver. 29 June 2009
Here’s something fun from my latest programming assignment, a Rubik’s Cube (sort of) with auto-solver. It was my first attempt at C++ language, a more powerful version of the C language. Personally, I prefer it over C because of the powerful built-in data structures and their equally-efficient member functions. Also, it’s much easier to do object oriented programming on it. Praise the guy who invented it!
Today, I’m giving away the source code for [2D]RubikSolve because it’s not easy to plagiarised and experienced coder probably won’t use my messy code.
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.