Hey folks, very long time since my last entry. I finally found some time between assignments (and games) to post an entry. The first semester of my first year here at University of Birmingham is almost over. I now come to a conclusion on what I have learned in these two and a half months I have been here.
Well… I have finally learned how to program in Java. Not because I was taught how to do it but because everybody assumed that I knew how, so most of the excersises I had to hand in was in fact in Java. An interesting subject I chose to attend this semester was Computational Vision. For me this was very interesting because the subject explains how the human vision system works and how we can apply the principles of the human vision system to process images in computers. The most interesting aspect of this is the future implementation possibilities of this techniques in robotics. I’m definitely going to continue this subject in my final year in robotics. This semester I also took on the most annoying programming language I have come across. Prolog.
Prolog is a Logic programming language. It takes facts as arguments and computes all the possible results. It has many implementations in AI (and this is the main reasons I attended this subject) but the language it self (or most probably the lecturer responsible for the subject) forced some limitations in the use of the language. For example we weren’t allowed to use if or conjuctions in our programs which resulted in writing very long programs. For all its annoyingness Prolog is a very powerful language and in the hands of an experienced programmer it can do wonders. For our final excersise in Prolog we had to do in implimentation of a 3D Tic Tac Toe game with smart computer moves. This was proven to be really fun and the computer player was hard to beat. Suprisingly enough.
We had some snow here in Birmingham, horay, so the people here may have a white xmas
Anyway, I’m leaving for Cyprus on the 10th of December (hopefully, there might be a strike at Birmingham Airport on the 10th).
Merry Xmas and a happy new year!!