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Welcome to Simia Cryptus, or “yet another code monkey” blog. And happy 2012! I’d like to start off this blog with a general introduction of what I intend to post. I will post roughly once a week, and I will write about the most interesting things I can think of related to the discipline of software development. I don’t like reading walls of text, so I will try to write posts that can be read in less than 10 minutes. My main goal is to take my hobby projects and present them as open source code with an introduction to the general concepts and a brief tour of the code.

In writing here, I hope to accomplish many things:

  1. Help my projects find interested communities and contributors
  2. Develop my ability to express ideas in writing in an engaging way
  3. Help my projects to contribute to the world, either in an educational or functional capacity, instead of rotting in an undiscoverable corner of the internet.

My projects will be open source, written in Java, and will strive to use the latest and best technologies. Where similar projects exist on the internet, I will do my best to point them out and give them due credit. To start, I would like to introduce a couple sample projects that I will write about on this blog in more depth another day: The Game of Go and Langton Ants.

The Game of Go

I started this project to experiment with artificial intelligence players and to explore variations on the classic game. Like many of my other projects, it is built with Google Web Toolkit and Google AppEngine. It takes advantage of HTML5 features such as websockets and the canvas element. One of the things I really like about GWT is that you can write a java library and also run it in a browser. In this case, the same artificial intelligence module can run on either the server side using Java, or on the browser using Javascript!

The code to Go can be found on Github. The main website for this project is on AppEngine.

Langton Ants

In 1994 I read an article in Scientific American about a simple cellular automaton program called Langton’s Ant. I began to experiment with this simulation and was fascinated by the variety of related ant programs I found. They are interesting and beautiful, and they were the subject of one of my first nontrivial applications. Now, almost two decades later, I have recreated these experiments using GWT and the HTML5 canvas. The code is on Github.

Finally, a little about me: My name is Andrew Charneski, and I am software consultant living near Seattle, WA. I received my bachelors degree in Engineering Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002, and since then I have worked for a wide variety of companies creating everything from slot machines to e-commerce websites to high-scale machine intelligence platforms. I have been programming since a very early age, starting with QuickBasic on the family computer and regular Basic on my very own Tandy PC-8. My passion is in creating technologies and tools that apply mathematics and algorithms to solving practical problems.

And so, welcome to my site. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to say Hi!