Entries in "request for information"
February 28, 2005
Graphics in C++
I'm trying to put together a simple graphical visualiser for the simulator I'm writing. All it needs to display are a rectangular arena, a couple of circles for the agent and the object it's tracking, and some lines to represent the agent's field of vision. It seems to me that this ought to be pretty easy, but I know nothing about graphics programming at all, so I'm looking for a library that I can use to simplify the process.
The problem is that I'm working on a Mac, and so far the only things I've found are very low-level, and entail a lot more work than makes sense when my requirements are so basic. I did find one library that looked ideal and had the added bonus of claiming to be cross-platform, but it turns out to require X Windows, and I couldn't get it to work with the X terminal that's built in to Mac OS.
Can anyone point me to a suitably high-level library for Mac OS or (even better) that will give me cross-platform graphics?
February 12, 2005
Trick the birdie
I'm putting together a talk proposal for Notacon. In the process, I'm finding myself jumping ahead (all they want this month is a 150 word abstract) and thinking about things that should actually be in the talk. One thing that should definitely be included is an example of how biological evolution can sometimes produce highly specialised controllers that are easy to trick, just like artificial evolution. It should only be a small anecdote, but it's starting to bug me because I know the specific example I want to give, but I can remember too few details of it. It's something that was described in a lecture back when I was an undergrad, but seeing as that was last millenium my memory of it is a little hazy on details. So here is the phenomenon: