Moving into a new flat I have ended up with a lot of cardboard and have actually struggled to get it to all be taken away. I then saw this Kickstarter on hacker news which introduced me to the idea that I could perhaps use the cardboard I had been throwing away the whole time. I have been toying with some ideas for building myself a robot, or at least a robot arm but they seem to be just ludicrously expensive and still not able to lift much weight. One of the problems with the advancement of robotics is that although processing power has come down in price at a rate that no other product ever has, the cost of actuators (The motion inducing components like motors) has remained largely the same. I want to explore an idea I have for using cheaper motors in a robotic arm in another post though. The problem I want to look at here is the possibility of being able to use cardboard, a material which can almost be considered to have a negative price, as the structure to the robot. I love the ...

I really struggle to remember the combinatorial rules. Do I need to use choose or do I need to use permute? How do I calculate each of them? Is this a case of stars and bars or is this something else? One of the things I want to add to my chatbot program is a way to ask which of the many systems should I be using? I did once try to build a javascript tool although I don’t think it ever really made itself into a useful state. I recently found a paper called “The twelvefold way” which explains all the different ways you put balls in boxes (or urns as is used in the paper). It really helped me to understand, at least a little better, how to calculate the different permutations of the problem. With this newfound understanding, I once again had a go at producing a program to calculate each, with a simple form-based input. One of the things that I wanted to extend this to doing was informing me of what the calculation method was. I really like the way google now lends a hand when you a...

 I've been working on an extension of the Voxel mesh in three JS that I built in this blog post and I'm thinking of developing it into an upcoming game at ManicVoxels.com To be able to expand the reach of the game to lower-power devices I needed to make the program more efficiently rendered. This would allow the players on the lower-powered devices to still have a reasonably sized world around them. When looking at the Greedy meshing tutorial from 0fps I really struggled to work out what the algorithm was. I then realised what is actually going on; you start in the top left, you go as far right as you can and then you go as far down as you can. You then repeat this until you have a new mesh. Once I'd worked out what greedy meshing was doing I could start to code it up. I've also added an animation of the algorithm below. In the animation, you can see the cursor moving from the top left to the bottom right. As if goes if the square is to be included in a new mesh then ...