Freeplane

After using the FreeMind mind mapping software for many years, navigation had become sluggish with a single mega map keeping my ever growing notes... Looking for some tips how to best split up the data map or if other people have similar problems and maybe someone is working on making the software faster or smarter, found out one or two of the core developers forked the project and created Freeplane based on FreeMind.

Loading the 2010 stable version 1.1.3 (FreeMind 0.9 is from early 2011) the sluggishness just disappeared. Good job!

Only thing is I had to configure Freeplane under Preferences to always save the folding information!

BTW, nowadays I use this Mind Mapping tool 99.99 percent as a kind of knowledge base or How To list. It is very quick to navigate (now again ;-), and when copy pasting things into a Unix terminal each line gets copied with a line ending, so before something gets ironed out in a little program shell script I can just keep some commands in FreeMine/Freeplane for later copy and paste usage.

For ToDo lists however I use and need something with a calendar, not for planning when to do what (that never worked for me as things always take their own time and everything else has been just wishful thinking on my side), but to pop up when I have to be reminded to focus or start with something (or to push something back).

OK, here are the links in case Google's servers are down today:

Freeplane
FreeMind

Ant Bots

Google Artificial Intelligence Challenge Competition



A 21 year old German student has programmed the best fighting ant colony bot, here is the German Spiegel article about him:

Der Spiegel: Der Ameisenkönig

Final Rankings

[Update 2012-03-04: The winner gives a detailed run down of his thought process and algorithms. Available is also the source code (less then 2000 lines of code for the main strategy class.]

Following is a list of different interesting games you can replay online...

Different styles, a bit chaotic

Smaller map, but very impressive fighting taktic by Xathis.

Very interesting, without the Xathis favorite, but GreanTea takes the win.

Xathis turns it around. Smaller map.

Big map, big fight

My favorite, thought Komaki makes a big mistake in the end leaving the flank to Xathis wide open...

Small game, GreanTea wins against Xathis

Ants, ants, ants (Xathis loses)

medusa vs Xathis. Xathis loses a hill early on, still wins in the end.

Tight fight, Xathis wins, but not clearly.

Interesting water structures, GreanThea.

Xathis, GreanThea, almost 1on1. The Final? Interesting retreating/frontier pattern.

protocolon beats Xathis and GreanTea. GreanTea makes a big mistake in the beginning. Also Xathis loses the home base early on to carlos.guia, but then protocolon has already grown very much.

Big armies, fun to watch

Decisions

If you happen to be on a Mac, there is simple and cheap decision support tool ala Benjamin Franklin's Pro/Con list made by Jonathan Clark.

Mac App Store: Decisions

Here is the original letter from Benjamin Franklin describing the process, thanks to Aaron Stannard's further elaborations:

To Joseph Priestley

London, September 19, 1772

Dear Sir,

In the Affair of so much Importance to you, wherein you ask my Advice, I cannot for want of sufficient Premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how.

When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time; but sometimes one Set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of Sight. Hence the various Purposes or Inclinations that alternately prevail, and the Uncertainty that perplexes us.

To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.

And tho' the Weight of Reasons cannot be taken with the Precision of Algebraic Quantities, yet when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to take a rash Step; and in fact I have found great Advantage from this kind of Equation, in what may be called Moral or Prudential Algebra.

Wishing sincerely that you may determine for the best, I am ever, my dear Friend,

Yours most affectionately

B. Franklin

Google - Translating

BTW, if the article is not accessible directly, goto Google News, search for the title, and go from there. At the moment most pay per view articles are free for Google users.

BTW BTW, this will be an area very difficult for Apple to compete in. Thought Apple has the cash reserves now, they don't have the expertise and no synergies to other areas of their business. They try already to catch up for maps.

BTW BTW BTW, the biggest progress in terms of artificial intelligence (well, since the invention of AI, whatever) is IMHO the Google Search database/engine. It is maybe not much more than a big big memory, but memory IS a VERY big part of intelligence! And every further software/module/engine/project can be build on top of that, with whatever new results and effects that might bring! However, and here is the problem with any further global progress and with Google itself, you better work for Google if you want to have the means and to have access to the goodies. Google has a treasure with nothing comparable in human history (gold, oil, land, resources, money, people, armies, you name it). And as you can see below, they intend on using it.

NY Times article: Google’s Computing Power Betters Translation Tool

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

“Our infrastructure is very well-suited to this,” Vic Gundotra, a vice president for engineering at Google, said. “We can take approaches that others can’t even dream of.”

...

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

Mr. Och, a German researcher who previously worked at the University of Southern California, said he was initially reluctant to join Google, fearing it would treat translation as a side project. Larry Page, Google’s other founder, called to reassure him.

“He basically said that this is something that is very important for Google,” Mr. Och recalled recently. Mr. Och signed on in 2004 and was soon able to put Mr. Page’s promise to the test.

While many translation systems like Google’s use up to a billion words of text to create a model of a language, Google went much bigger: a few hundred billion English words. “The models become better and better the more text you process,” Mr. Och said.

JavaNCSS

JavaNCSS is a little Java source measurement tool and open source project that I started some 12 years ago. It's the personal software project of mine that got the most traction and is still in some use, even thought I stopped developing in Java myself and had very little time to keep up with the support and development work that was neccessary.

With lot's of effort did move the programm to support the new Java 1.4 grammar back then, but still, some esoteric open bugs with new grammar features like annotations remained.

Then some people using the tool in their project (Sonar) and a vivid maintainer of the popular Maven build tool showed up, wanting to move things forward. With the help of Simon Brandhof and Hervé Boutemy the project got opened up, first Simon helped giving JavaNCSS an all around infrastructure (at Codehaus.org, which also hosts the JRuby, Jetty, and Groovy projects), with mailing lists, a public bug tracking system, and a source code repository that allows multiple people to work in parallel on the software. Then Hervé worked on the code to bring it into the Maven world, allowing other people and projects to include and invoke JavaNCSS easily through this popular build infrastructure.

Both changes had the effect that we got a lot more input from the user community with explicit error reports AND contributed code solutions! Over the years I had always gotten individual error reports and particular fixes, but this had all been hidden for the other users before a release and notably a bottleneck had been that changes to the Java grammars are very very tricky and time consuming without the experience. Now we got important and difficult grammar fixes contributed by Sébastien Reynaud. Freddy Mallet even made a prototype of a whole new architecture and grammar system based on the visitor pattern.

Yesterday we released the third version since these changes took place, but it has been the first one where all code changes have been done by Hervé (including test cases) with major bug fixes supplied by Sébastien!

Happy to see JavaNCSS opening up and to get a life of its own, thanks to all the people now and over the years who have given it their support...