A little while back I stumbled upon a fun generative art project by Maxime Chevalier called Turing drawings that produces 2D procedural art based on randomly generated Turing machines. The project’s code is in JavaScript using a HTML canvas which you can try online, just hit the random button to generate all sorts of weird and wonderful pieces. The project has inspired amongst other things a port to asm.js and a version with genetic recombination of URLs. For fun I’ve created an F# script that generates T[...]

Last night I popped down to Southampton to talk about F# in the Enterprise at the Developer South Coast meetup started by John McLoughlin. The group has grown quite a bit since last time I was down in 2010, and the hall was packed with about 50 members. It’s a really friendly group with a lot of interesting activities going on including hack weekends covering everything from electronics all the way through to games programming. FSharp in the enterprise from ptrelford John contacted me after interest[...]

Off the back of the popular Machine Learning hands on session at Skills Matter last month where we created a digit recognizer, last night we tackled a new dataset. Again we took a task from Kaggle’s online predictive modelling competitions. This time the data set was passenger details from the Titanic, with the task to analyse who was likely to survive. Machine learning from disaster from ptrelford Guided Task: http://trelford.com/titanic.zip (unblock the file, unzip to C:\titanic, load in VS2012 an[...]

Last weekend I teamed up with other gamers for the Creative Assembly game jam at Rezzed. We had 9 hours to create a game, and were given the theme of the 80s at 9am on the Saturday morning. After some brainstorming we came up with the idea of a platform game that became an endless runner with rhythm and puzzles called We Jammin’: The main character is a skateboarder, collecting 80s artefacts to build up the volume on each track, while hitting mental blocks depletes the volume. All 4 tracks must reach t[...]

Scott Wlaschin has just posted a really interesting series on Dependency cycles over on the F# for fun and profit site. The last post shows cycles and modularity in the wild comparing open source C# and F# projects including SpecFlow and TickSpec which have almost identical functionality,. Here’s the dependency diagram for SpecFlow (C#):   and for TickSpec (F#): They both have very similar functionality and in fact TickSpec implements it’s own parser too. Read Scott’s article to better understand w[...]