Collatz Conjecture for TI Graphing Calculators

As part of a chain of snow days, my high school opened with a two hour delay today. General academic periods were shortened, and thus with a shortened mathematics first period class today we learned a whopping amount of nothing– so I found alternate entertainment.

I quickly wrote a program on a classroom graphing calculator from no experience with the TI programming language, just by improvising based on feedback from the inlay debugger; it’s the Collatz Conjecture for TI graphing calculators.

Quick Project: Mouse Coordinate Image Mapper

As a rather quick project and something to keep my free time, I decided to mess around with the Windows User32.dll functions.

Digging through I found two functions that caught my interest instantly:

mouse_event(int dwFlags, int dx, int dy, int dwData, int dwExtraInfo);

and

SetCursorPos(int x, int y);

Both of those functions control the position and events applied to the user’s mouse. Interestingly enough, this allows applications to fully control the mouse, which leads me to assume this is what most “auto-clicker” applications tap into to enable the trivial functionality they offer. Continuing on with my programming, I decided it would be rather interesting to try and implement a two-tone filter using only the mouse.

The Philosophy of Randomness

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
- Carl Sagan

It can reasonably be said that the universe is absolutely labyrinthine in the nature of the distribution of particles and the events that take place with them. The only tools we have to unravel the threads of events and time are the tools of our own observations.

I tried experimenting with computational random number generators to produce an image of complete randomness with the distribution of pixels mapped by the standard pseudo random number algorithm. The image I had generated from my micro-experiment was to no surprise much like that of a “noise filter” on image editing software.

Center of Mass Updated

The Center of Mass program I’ve previously devised yesterday has been extended to include different forms of input. Specifically, I added ability to input Polar and Cylindrical coordinates, thus giving a capability to mix coordinate systems together.

Calculating Center of Mass with Python

As a quick weekend project given by Zachary Peterson, I’ve wrote an algorithm to calculate the center of mass by particle inputs. The program takes in a three dimensional vector for Cartesian position and a decimal value for mass; it returns R as a three dimensional vector containing the center of mass.

Python Iterative Permutations

As a side project, I’ve been working on a permutation algorithm in the Python Programming Language. It utilizes research by Professor Phillip Fuchs translated to a python environment with optimizations achieved by the sole interpretation of the language; the implementation contains these optimizations while still retaining semantics and logic on the original C++ program.

ASCIIMovie.py – CIS Project

ASCIIMovie is a short project created for a few students studying ASCII-Art in CIS.

The directory structure typically has the frames in a sub-folder with the configuration and the program in the root folder. Frames are labeled with ##.txt. With a natsort implementation, the frames can be infinite in numbers, even if some are missing out of a series.

The configuration is INI-like, loaded using the native configuration library in Python.