Berkeley Hackathon 2009
I participated in the Berkeley Hackathon 2009, last night from 6pm to 12 noon the next day (pictures). The goal was to build the most impressive or useful application possible in 18 hours, in teams of one to four.
Our team (of two) took 2nd place and won laptops! There were a ton of really awesome projects – my favorite was the Missile Command game that, when your cities got bombed, it actually corrupted a selectable application’s memory because “games don’t have harsh enough consequences.” Failure to protect your cities resulted in the death of an application before your very eyes.
The first place was a web API that allowed you to run an application in a thick AND thin client at the same time – not just pushing bitmaps, but actually rendered in HTML!
Our entry was a 3D visualization of news data & relationships in Java & OpenGL – I want to make a few tweaks, but I hope to post it soon.
3D News-Vis
A 3D visualization of Yahoo! news data
Created for the 2009 Berkeley Hackathon in 18 hours, this visualization queries data from the Yahoo! News API and displays each result as a cube. By clicking on cubes, a heuristic algorithm selects salient words from the existing news entry and re-queries the new topic.
Created in collaboration with Yiding Jia, we won 2nd pace in the Hackathon.
Download: Source (Java, requires JOGL)
Tagged on February 14, 2009 at 12:00 am
AI, Pacman & Python…
I’m taking an Artificial Intelligence class this semester, and the class uses Pacman (in Python) as a pedagogical tool for learning AI. What a great idea! The projects typically start off by asking you to play a game of Pacman, and then dive into the content.
Here is one of the projects, if you are interested.
Also, if you want to use this system at your school, I think they are actively seeking other instructors to try it. Contact Dan Klein if you are interested in more information.
Tagged Tags: AI, Algorithms, Python on February 13, 2009 at 12:18 pm
