31 Jan 2015

Generating Game Trees using Depth- and Breadth-First Search

In a previous post I described how to visualize game trees using D3.js. Now I'll present two animations of the creation of the game tree using two of the most common tree traversal algorithms: depth-first search and breadth-first search.

25 Jan 2015

Visualizing Game Trees with D3.js

D3.js is a JavaScript library for data visualization. It is proving to be very versatile and powerful, thanks to the technologies upon which it is based: JavaScript, SVG, and CSS. In this post I will show how to use D3.js to visualize game trees using Mauler, the abstract strategy games framework that I described in a previous post.

01 Aug 2014

Mauler: A JavaScript Framework for Abstract Strategy Games

In this post I present Mauler, a JavaScript framework for abstract strategy games. This framework includes a collection of games and game-playing algorithms, and utility functions to play these games. Mauler will be used in following blog posts to describe algorithms such as Minimax, Alpha-Beta and Monte-Carlo Tree Search.

22 Jun 2014

Estimating PI using Monte Carlo Simulations

Monte Carlo simulations are a class of computational algorithms that involve multiple computational trials driven by random sampling to approximate the optimal solution. In this post we describe how Monte Carlo simulations work and demo with a JavaScript program how to use this method to estimate the value of π.

07 Apr 2014

Reinstalling Vim on OS X Mavericks

1. brew install mercurial
2. hg clone https://code.google.com/p/vim/
3. cd vim
4. ./configure --enable-pythoninterp --enable-rubyinterp --prefix=/usr
5. make
6. sudo make install
7. restart the terminal
8. and vim --version