Mountain View

I created the InfoQ Alexa skill

A while ago I started exploring the current state of voice interfaces and smart home technology. One particular interesting smart home application is Amazon’s Alexa. It’s a device with a speaker which can answer questions, turn lights on/off, and can give you a so-called flash briefing. You can develop Alexa skills yourself, and publish them in Amazon’s store. Skills are…

World’s longest palindrome?

In honor of the 20th of February, 2002, a palindromic date, Peter Norvig designed his worlds longest unique palindromic sentence of 21,012 words. With a new palindromic date approaching on August 10, 2018 (8102018), I wanted to take some time to see if I could put my own spin on a palindrome world record. While Norvig focused on making his…

Painting by Prime Number

Two weeks ago I stumbled upon the concept of prime portraits. In short, prime portraits are pictures in which each color is assigned a number. When we align every pixel, the result should be a prime number. Because I could not find the code used in the article, I decided to recreate these prime portraits in Python – in color!…

TRADR SIKS summerschool 2017

A few weeks ago I gave an introductory course to reinforcement learning with the OpenAI Gym environment. As content, I used the writeups I already put on my site several weeks ago. I asked Jasper van der Waa (TNO), who co-organized it, to write a short summary of the summer school. For some years now it is quite clear that…

Getting started with OpenAI gym

The OpenAI gym environment is one of the most fun ways to learn more about machine learning. Especially reinforcement learning and neural networks can be applied perfectly to the benchmark and Atari games collection that is included. Every environment has multiple featured solutions, and often you can find a writeup on how to achieve the same score. By looking at…