Silicon Surfer

I used to participate in robotics contests called RoboCon back in college days. Essentially it was a contest where bunch of teams from a bunch of colleges built(guess what!) robots- both manually controlled and autonomous. It is not as cool as I thought it was in those years, so I won't get into much details and jump right into the subject. I used be an 'electronics guy' in this team, designing sensor systems and circuits and such. We would make boards and do make some nasty wiring to connect them to make the robots work. These circuits, mimicked from hobby sites, coupled with limited understanding of design techniques were quite fickle. Things would work to our satisfaction sometimes, and most other times they would not. And then we would go about patching them in some last ditch, mindless effort to get our robots to work in the arena so that we could save face. Debugging used to be a wild-goose chase in those days. But hey, not everything in the world is so dark. Someti

I watched 'Enigma of Kasper Hauser' today. Very few people might have heard name of this movie. A great movie. I can't say that it is entertaining for most of the people, but I really enjoyed it. The way Kasper learns to speak is pretty analogous to natural language processing; his logic,way he thinks about his existence is unique and original. His logic sounds funny sometimes. He says, when he is in the room and when he looks both sides, he sees the room. But while watching tower from outside, tower can be seen on only one side. So, room is bigger than tower. But as I was thinking about flaws of logic, I figure out that it is totally based on visual perception, not on cognition. It was not complete knowledge as he did not feel it or tried to verify his testimony. If he would have walked around both room and tower, his conclusion would've been different. However we can bear Kasper doing this thing but statements without knowledge of subject are not acceptable from me