Roddy of the Frozen Peas

When I get depressed, I program. I recently found myself in a severe funk, so I started looking around for some interesting programming projects to do.

Enter Project Euler. (For the uninitiated or uninformed, that's pronounced "Oiler", not "Yew-ler.") Project Euler contains a series of over 300 mathematical and logical problems of various difficulties. The idea is, with all these programming languages available, a solution should be possible.

I decided, for the sake of being different, that I'd do my Project Euler problems in PLT Scheme.

1. Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5. (19 November 2010)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend today. He is in materials and metallurgical engineering, with a ceramics specialty. It went something like this:

Alex: "I heard a new word today. Dramatical."

Roddy: "Hm. Sounds like high school."

Alex: "Yes. It was exclaimed in between mounting and grinding."

A very long awkward pause as I try to wrap my head around this last statement.

Roddy: "...So you were either at an orgy, watching porn, or in some sort of materials lab. Considering what school we attended, I make no assumptions."

Layout Name: Water Lily
Version: 2.01
Creator: Roddy of the Frozen Peas (roddy)

Derivative Information:
Based on the Wordpress "Water Lily" layout found at Theme Junction, where it is released free under the GPL. Attribution has been added to the CSS code.

Some notes:
If you look at the original Water Lily theme, you'll notice that they do some cool CSS tricks with the date. I was hoping to get that same effect here, but the physical layout of the Tabula Rasa layout made it impossible for me to do so. I will keep trying, though, so keep your eyes open for a new version of Water Lily at some point.

Additionally, I have run out of energy and have not yet converted this layout into S2. Sorry. But it is fully installable on top of a blank Tabula Rasa with the CSS code I've included below.

Screenshots:


( Click for CSS )

Installation instruction will be found at layouttree forthwith.

Last updated: 3 September 2010

One of the most interesting aspects of the old "Roguelike" games are their dungeon building algorithms. Every time you descend into the depths of the dark cave or the gloomy catacombs, you're faced with a new, automatically generated setting. There are rooms of treasure, long corridors filled with traps, hidden rooms, and so forth.

Dungeon generation, I would hazard to say, is one of the most fascinating problems in computer science, not only because of how common it is in game development, but because of the sheer scope of the problem. It is, at its heart, a purely decision-based situation. Should this tile be a wall or a floor? Are all the rooms connected? No? How do I connect them? Where should I put the door? Where do I put the traps?

There are many different algorithms out there that focus on this problem. Some are rooted in cellular biology and artificial life that create some very cool looking cave-like structures with irregularly shaped rooms. Others produce honest-to-god mazes and labyrinths of winding corridors and few open spaces.

Today we are going to focus on a very simple dungeon generation program that will build the dungeon itself, but not place anything in it. Doors, traps, stairs, monsters, and treasures will not fall within the scope of this program. Even the dungeon itself will be rather simplistic: it will consist of square or rectangular rooms, and corridors.
( Dungeon generation )