Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children (1998). My favorite Boards of Canada album and one of my favorite albums of all time, this is full of wonderful moments from start to finish. Some sequences of it still give me chills, such as the Kaini Industries + Bocuma + Roygbiv combination. A mandatory album for those who are into ambient/idm music.

Beefcake – Coincidentia Oppositorum (2000). I only heard about Beefcake after listening to Kattoo (which is Volker Kahl – 1/2 of Beefcake). Their music, and this album in particular, pushes the boundary of industrial idm into the neoclassic realm. It is also very diverse but consistent altogether, something I highly appreciate in an album.

Zomby – Dedication (2011). Some sort of weird dubstep with a dark touch, something I wouldn’t expect from 4AD. I eventually get bored after repeated listenings, but like to get back to it every now and then. A curious album, to say the least.

Moderat – Moderat (2009). A collaboration between Modeselektor and Apparat resulted in this album. It is bassy, with some unusual sounds reminiscent of Apparat’s music, but not as beat-oriented as most of Modeselektor’s work. It is kind of cheesy, has a stronger start than finish, but I like it nonetheless.

Burial – Untrue (2007). I started listening to dubstep through Burial. Burial made my original idea of what dubstep was, before I thought that wobble bass was a mandatory ingredient. This album is incredibly consistent. Burial manages to keep a perfect craft from start to finish, mixing dark ambient sounds and garage beats with vocal samples worked with exceptional skill.

Prefuse 73 – One Word Extinguisher (2003). One of those mandatory albums from Prefuse 73 (along with Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives), “One Word Extinguisher” is one of those “instrumental hip-hop meets idm” efforts. The songs are short and constantly morphing and even if you’re not much into the hip-hop field (as I am not) it should prove an interesting listen.

Grouper – A I A : Dream Loss (2011). Grouper continues where she left us after Dragging a Dead Dear up a Hill with the A I A dual release (Dream Loss and Alien Observer). The two albums are similar in taste. I tend to prefer Dream Loss because of the heavier use of distortions. Expect dark ambient, lo-fi, drone mixed with dreamy soundscapes.

M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (2011). One of my personal favorites from 2011, this is building up as my favorite M83 album as well (surpassing Saturdays = Youth). It’s dream pop at its best, with a taste of ambient and shoegaze. It even has a contribution from Zola Jesus on the “Intro” track, whose voice I find fitting perfectly in the mood M83 usually sets up for his songs.

Hecq – Avenger (2011). Panzer dubstep is the best description I can get for this album (taken from a rating at rym). The mood on Hecq’s albums has always been dark. This time he brings that to the dubstep field, with some huge basslines and a contribution from Matta. A great listen with the headphones on.

Mouse on Mars – Autoditacker (1997). I’m a huge fan of Mouse on Mars. They mix jungle, glitch, idm and ambient with a funky vibe. “Autoditacker” is a perfect example of that, and it features “Tux & Damask”, the first song I ever listened from them.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

Albert Einstein, on Principles of Research, for Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday.

Today I discovered the work of scientist/photographer/inventor/entrepreneur/explorer Harold Edgerton. The Edgerton Digital Collections project has a lot of resources I highly recommend.

This year, I was contacted by @fabrantes a week before the event. He had an embryonic idea for a game that somehow mixed frenetic battles, fluid dynamics and voxatron-like graphics. We ended up building up a team that consisted of @fabrantes, @pmcteixeira, @regadas and me. There were somehow implicit responsibilities already assigned so when we got to the place we just spent a few minutes aligning our ideas for the project. It consisted of a multi and single-player game that would run in the browser. It would be supported in WebGL in the front-end and Node.js in the back-end. Each player would control a cube in a squared arena and the goal would be to push the other players’ cubes out of it. In order to do so, you would be able to send a shock wave that would create a ripple effect in the floor and, as a consequence, apply certain forces to the cubes that were affected by it. By the end of the first day, we also had @grillher joining us on creating the scenery walls that would move alongside the music.

I got responsible for the AI of the bots. I thought of a simple strategy that would involve each bot moving to a calm place in the board and shooting in the direction of the closest player. I thought I would need something to calculate the shortest path given the different intensities on the board, so I ended up implementing a sort of customized Dijkstra’s algorithm that resembled an A*, and a priority queue in JavaScript as a consequence of that. I reduced the problem of finding a calm spot in the arena to a variant of the maximum contiguous subset sum problem in a matrix. I didn’t have the time in the contest to tweak some of the calculations but my main conclusion was that there simply isn’t enough CPU time to do all this work.

The other guys were doing an amazing job. The shock wave behaviour was very interesting, the visuals were eye-candy and it was already possible to set up a connection to the main server that was orchestrating the whole game. By the end of the 48 hours competition, we managed to have a working prototype, a damn fine-looking one, and ended up grabbing the 5th place of the public vote, which has pretty awesome!

Long story short, this year’s Codebits was great. I didn’t do much besides working on the project (still saw the presentation karaoke and the quiz show, though), but left the venue with my technical curiosity spiked and a great will to work on Codename: Arena.

We actually ended up revisiting the project on muchBeta‘s hackafone, and are planning to continue working on it on a regular basis. Game AI poses some interesting challenges, and I will be doing some research on the subject for the next days (and hopefully blogging about it).