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Netflix Prize teams sprint to the finish

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Netflix Prize is nearing the one year point tomorrow, with a $50,000 payoff. It is turning into a good geek race.

The second and third place teams, Gravity and Dinosaur Planet have combined to form "When Gravity and Dinosaurs Unite". They now have a first place score of 8.38% improvement.  This edges out BellKor, who also improved their score to 8.38%. 

While the new combined team is listed first, they may not actually win the progress prize.  To prevent any information leakage, the Leaderboard only shows the improvement of a randomly selected half of the test set.  It the other half of the test set that actually counts.  So with scores identical to four decimals, either may be ahead. 

It will interesting to see who pulls it out tomorrow, and if there will be any better entries.

Amazon's EC2 is pretty cheap

Amazon announced a limited beta test of a new on line utility computing service.  For $0.10/CPU hour, you can setup and run any number of virtual servers.  That works out at $876 per CPU year.  That's a bit more than you'd pay for a dedicated server, but the cool thing is that you can (at least in theory) have 1000 servers one day when you need them, and none the next. I wonder how many real servers they have at their disposal.

Kevin Werbach has an article about it here.

Tim Bray likes Ruby

I'm intrigued by the programming language Ruby.  I'm on the cusp of breaking down to start using it.  Tim Bray (of Sun) has some interesting posts on his blog, as he starts to learn the language.

While on the subject of Ruby, the Ruby Weekly News website is a good summary of the relevant mail lists, for the interested lurker.

Mathematica 6 out this week?

I'm really hoping that Mathematica 6 is released this week.  The NKS 2006 conference runs from June 16-18, followed immediately by the International Mathematica Symposium 2006, from June 19-23.  I will fearlessly predict that they will release version 6 to coincide with these events. 

Why? If you look at the program [pdf] for IMS 2006, a number of tracks are on new features in version 6, so it seems like a release is in store.  If you track normal times between major Mathematica releases, we are about due.

As a Mathematica user since 1.2, I'm hoping for lots of big improvements.

Update: well, it is June 29th, 2006, and no announcement on MMa 6.  I guess we'll have to wait until the Wolfram Technology Conference in October.  There are several training classes on new features in version 6 being taught at the conference, so that's an upper bound on the release date.

In the mean time, the Eclipse based IDE called Wolfram Workbench looks interesting. I just wish I were a "Premiere" customer so I could try it out.

Update 2: The Wolfram Technology Conference wasn't the release date either.  Go figure.  So now I've got no idea.  Even weirder, they made all the participants sign NDA's so there any talk about what was said at the conference.

Update 3: My latest guess is March 15, 2007. 
See here.

Sending a bunch of pictures with Pando

I came across an article in CNN Money by Om Malik, that talks about how to send large files to other people.  (link via Dave.)

I got a new digital camera, and I've got a big folder of pictures I'd like to send to my parents. They have a Mac, so they can just suck them into iPhoto. I could use the Photocasting feature built into iPhoto, but I don't want to have to pay for a .Mac account just to transfer some files. I've been trying to figure out the easiest way to do this. 

The Pando service is just the ticket.  It is a little program for PC's or Macs that lets you upload a folder of files.  It then sends a little .pando file via email to the recipient, who uses it as a key to download the same files.  All free for now (love that business model ;-).

Aibo is gone, but Pleo is to come

Lots of people were bummed that Sony discontinued the Aibo robot dog in January.

However, I'm looking forward to the new robotic dinosaur called Pleo from the startup Ugobe. It debuted at DEMO 06, which is always a good sign that it will be interesting.

Do you think these two items are related?  The $2000 Aibo displaced by the $200 Pleo? 

I'm sure going to get one for Alden's birthday in November.  (Good thing he can't read, huh?)

CMU's Red Team Racing

Congratulations to Carnegie Mellon's Red Team Racing for coming in 2nd and 3rd in the DARPA Grand Challenge. This was a race of robot vehicles that had to drive themselves around a 132 mile desert course. Last year, the best car only made it about 7 miles.  This year, 5 vehicles finished the race.  Unfortunately (for an alum like me :-), the two CMU entries lost to the Stanford team.  As this article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette points out, at least the Professors leading the Stanford team went to CMU.

The funny thing about robot racing is that they should be able to tell who won ahead of time.  They program them to run a certain course at a fixed speed, and in general they finish to within a few seconds of schedule.  CMU's H1ghlander vehicle had the fastest plan, but it veered way off schedule for some reason.  The latest entry on the Red Team web site suggested engine problems. I hope they'll let us know what happened.

I love the "Wildest Dream" poster they have (pdf!).  Very cool image.

M-Audio StudioPro 4 Speakers

Nothing is every easy with computers.  I ordered an Apple Airport Express, the little WiFi gizmo that has an audio out jack.  You take it anywhere in the house, and you can plug it into your stereo, a pair of powered speakers, etc.  The music from iTunes magically comes out of it.  Very neat.  I run the CD with the software, and it says I need to be as OSX 10.3 or later, and I'm at 10.2.8.  So close. I guess this is a reason to upgrade to Tiger (10.4).  So I make a run to the Apple Store to buy Tiger.  I get it home, and it won't install.  I have a problem with my disk. I run the Disk Utility, and it says I have a problem it can't fix.  Lovely.  So I've ordered Diskwarrior by overnight delivery.  I'll try again tomorrow.  Hopefully it will be able to fix it. 

The one really good thing from my trip to the Apple Store is that I bought a new pair of powered speakers, to replace those little balls that come with an iMac.  They are the StudioPro 4 from M-Audio.  They were sitting a little forlornly on the bottom shelf.  The guy in the Apple Store really didn't want to sell them to me.  "They're monitors for a keyboard - not for listening to music."   He showed me a number of sub-woofer/satellite combos that didn't do much for me.  Eventually I convinced him that it would be OK to buy them, and I'm very glad I did.  They're sturdy little mini-monitor speakers, with a 4" woofer.  The stuff coming out of iTunes sounds like *music* now, instead of a vague approximation.  In audiophile speak, they commit errors of omission, not commission.  They actually have a sound-stage that isn't half bad for $145.  They don't play terribly loud (they're 18W), and they don't have a lot of low bass.  But they make music, which is high compliment indeed.

Scheduling a card tournament with 4 players

My friend Brad had a really interesting real world optimization problem.  He wants to have a card tournament where either 16, 28, or 40 players play.  There are 4 players in each hand, and they play a number of rounds.  The trick is to schedule the tournament so that each player plays all of the other players exactly once.  Belive it or not, he actually had a party like this for 16 players, and he wanted to try 28 or 40.  To work out evenly with n players, you need to have both n/4, and (n-1)/3 be integers. For example, it works for the folowing combinations of players and hands played:

(Players, hands played)
{4,1}   
{16,5}   
{28,9}   
{40,13} 
{52,17} 
{64,21} 
{76,25} 
{88,29} 
{100,33}

Given that I'm the "optimization guy", I'm supposed to be able to solve problems like this.  I tried soving it with mixed integer programming, but it has a really lousy LP relaxation.  It turns out constraint programming is a better approach.  I eventually found a web page by Warick Harvey  at IC-Parc at Imperial College that gives the best known solutions for these problems.  He calls it the "social golfer" problem, or "Kirkman's schoolgirl problem".  (Imperial is great school, by the way. My advisor, and lots of other cool folks went to Imperial.)

I'm just posting about the problem, because it was really hard to find the page in Google, given that I wasn't searching on "Golf".  If you're scheduling any tournament with more than 2 participants in each round, you're in luck. 

One step closer to EastEnders

This article in the Independent is good news:

Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet. Viewers will be able to scan an online guide and download any show. Programmes would be viewed on a computer screen or could be burned to a DVD and watched on a television set. ...

The three-week pilot, called iMP (Internet Media Player), will allow 500 of the corporation's staff to step into this new world of viewing. They will be given PDAs and access to a range of BBC programmes, which will include the soap EastEnders and the hospital drama Holby City. Also available will be the series One Life, the dramas Cutting It and Grease Monkeys, the motoring show Top Gear and news bulletins.

As I've written about in several posts, this would be a wonderful thing for expats, like my wife. She currently has no way of watching EastEnders in the U.S., since it was dropped by BBC America.

Lets hope they don't lock it in somehow to their domestic market. Hopefully, they say their radio player is the inspiration, and my wife currently enjoys Radio 4 just fine.