Leave it to roll-oh

I'm doing an essay on robot butlers at the moment. This is a funny video of what people thought of in 1940's. I love the 'Scram!' function and the kettle that unplugs itself rather than simply turning off.

Enough's enough

Don't get me wrong, I've had more fun than most in the last few weeks, running up hills then sliding down, sometimes even successfully, again.

But when will this dirt-bag snow any ice go? You know the final straw? Not only did it stop me playing football all last week, but now its been stopping me watch football. i don't even let people stop me from watching football, who does this snow think he is.

I've written it a letter and am also considering writing to my MP, i just hope it heeds the warning and buggers off. Give me my football back dammit, I'm still being weighed down by my xmas over-indulgence.

Humphff

Dogs love the snow and so do i

USA Easter 2009

Just updated the pictures for easter this year. backdated to the right place and also under photos and travels. so have a look if you like things.

Investigating Evolving Controllers for Simulated Humanoids

Well, if you're bored, or are having trouble sleeping then:

Have a read of this

That's everything I've done so far and will do in the next couple of months, snore.......

New controller

As the improvement of the robot in evolution was so slow I've been thinking of how to simplify the controller in order for there to be less values to change.

So what i've done is break the controller down. and only have it control one half of the body. Then run the inputs through it twice, but swapping the left and right leg on the second run.

This takes the number of connections down from:

Inputs:

15 bodies x 3 coords = 45

Hidden:

50

Output:

20

Input to Hidden = 45 x 50 = 2,250

Hidden to Output = 50 x 20 = 1,000

Total = 3,250

To:

Inputs:

45

Hidden:

25

Output:

12

Input to Hidden = 45 x 25 = 1,125

Hidden to Output = 25 x 12 = 300

Total = 1,425

Firstly this means both sides act the same (obviously not at the same time).

Secondly its easier to train a smaller network.

Thirdly computationally, even running the smaller network through twice only leads to 2,850 connections being considered.

Hope that works now, the new idea is below:

In front of the front foot

This is the result of the fitness function based on a dream....
It needs more tweaking methinks
Basically at each time-step it sees which foot is furthest forwards, then gives points if either foot is further forwards in the next time step. I hoped this would stop the leg dragging behaviour.