The blog of Blayze Millward
Well, it's certainly been a while since my last blog post, eh? But I have not sat idly by watching the sands of time pass me by! Quite the opposite! The last two years have been busy - I've finished my bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, and for some mad reason I've decided to stick around, choosing to start a PhD candidacy there, where I'm studying the information content retrievable by insect eyes....
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Well, it's been a little longer than the "few weeks" I said that I'd take to test my little lucid dream inducer. But at last I am here to divulge the results! Sadly, as you may have guessed already at this point, my hypothesis did not stand. Try as I might, not once did the device give me any better luck in lucid dream induction. However, I did learn a few useful lessons in design as a result, as well as gain some insight into the way we react to external stimuli while asleep....
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Following my last performance in the oxford heats of FameLab - a science communication competition - I returned this Wednesday, March 8th, to the regional final at the Bullingdon, Oxford.
This time around I was attempting to explain, in my given 3 minute block, how artificial neural networks work. The whole event was being streamed, and you can see my segment above. The entire show can be found here. It's worth the watch for a few hours of good, informative viewing....
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For my first project post of 2017, I think I'll about something a little off-the-wall. So, without further ado, it's time for me to talk about something I've found fascinating since 2012 when I started dabbling in psychology, hypnosis and mentalism: Lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is like a normal dream, but with the key difference being that the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. Once the dreamer has realised this fact, it is said that they can then exact a level of control over the dream, which - according to some people - has some fantastic applications in getting creative inspiration to problems, helping people get over nightmares, and encouraging you to actually sleep regular hours....
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Last Thursday, February 9th, at the recommendation of my family, I rather impulsively entered FameLab UK - a competition with the goal of finding "scientists and engineers with a flair for communicating with public audiences"....
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Last month, I took a trip up to my educational mainstay - Sheffield University - in order to take part in the 3rd game jam run by the Computer Science Society, a 30 hour games programming jam dubbed "ShefJam". Being the first year I'd actually competed in the jam without having to worry about helping organise it, I was totally hyped.
This time around I had decided to put together a 3D game and focus on the graphics, something that I figured would be a lot more relaxing than desperately scrambling to write a game from the base up again....
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On the back of the last post, I'm going with some slightly lighter reading. A lot of people have been asking about the background on this website, so this post will go into detail about how it came to be and some interesting things learned.
Initially I had wanted to keep the background of my site as clean as possible, with a simple repeating background image. So I headed over to the infinitely useful website subtlePatterns.com and started idly browsing through different patterns until I eventually came across a very nice pattern called footer lodyas that kind of reminded me of the robotic-like stuff from that movie 'The Signal'....
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About three months ago I held a small talk on the benifits of using genetic algorithms to help debug and test code, as well as showing what I think is a fantastic example of how critical data density can be to a system. All of this stemmed from a fairly simple task: Writing a program to play a game of Solitaire.
At the request of people who were not able to attend, this post will go through most of what was covered at the talk.
The task was set by our lecturer as an exercise in functional programming, so all the code referenced below will be in Haskell and the actual functionality of the system will be kept intentionally vague....
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So, I've finally moved into the era of blogging! For those of you who know me in real life, then soon you'll find posts about everything you would talk to me about in real life right here in an easy-to-read web format! For anyone who happens to have wandered in from the internet, then you should hope to see posts covering a range of tech-related topics, from AIs to microcontrollers.
The blog will be updated as and when I come across something I think readers would be interested in, so feel free to add it to your favourites and check back every so often.
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