Fame!

View picture 2 of the Beeb's coverage of the Birmingham tornado. Make sure you read the caption

We are alright. To tell the truth I didn't even take the photo; Bree's mum did. All I knew at the time was that there was a lot of rain.

Shed Razing and Shed Raising

Last week's big project: taking down the rotten wooden shed, and erecting a new aluminium one. It was a big project, but we got by with a little help from our friends. Tuesday we destroyed the old shed, with help from Dave and Will. It was rotten enough we could kick down the walls. Hulk smash! This was the fun bit. On Wednesday Dave helped us erect the roof of the new shed. This was the unfun bit. A thousand screws, metal parts that didn't line up, and crazy instructions. On Thursday Rocio showed up with her magic electric screwdriver, and progress accelerated. The shed is up, though doors need to be attached. Anyway, it provided a handy box to store all the junk from the old shed, clearing the patio for yesterday's BBQ in honour of Bree's birthday. Which was a most excellent evening!

Wow, The New House!

IMGP1287.JPG
Originally uploaded by Noel Welsh.

This photo is one of 25 of the new house. Just click on it to see the rest. This is a special bonus set of photos as it has cats in it as well!!

We Won!

Incredibly enough we won our football game 2-0. First win of the season!

Tidbits

I don't know anyone injured in the London bombings. Concerned parents, be concerned no more!

Looked at my cycle speedometer recently and see I have set a new (personal) land speed record of 52kmh! That's faster than the speed limit (30mph = 48kph)!

Broadband Cometh

This post comes from home, via the new wireless router that has just arrived, to complement our 2Mbps ADSL connection that was activated last week. Yay!

Well there isn't much more to say. I'm about to go to University to play in our weekly football match. No doubt we'll be thrashed, as usual. The kittens are rough-housing, as usual. The write up of my algorithm is going ok. I hoped to get it finished before my supervision today, but that won't happen. It is hard to get work done when one is being used as a climbing frame. And yeah, the broadband, that might have been a distraction.

Approaching A Result

I'm writing up an algorithm for learning variable size finite state controllers. It is mostly an amalgamation of other people's work, but it should give me publishable results, a hence a paper, by Christmas. It's nice to be making some progress on the PhD after so long thrashing around trying to find a direction.

Our Three Boys

Our Three Boys
Originally uploaded by Noel Welsh.

This post is a constructive proof that blogs are just made of cat photos. This is the two surviving kittens being supervised by the resident big cat.

The white and grey guy is eating well and looking like he will recover, though he is currently 200g lighter than his brother. He doesn't think much of his brother beating him up, though this is the most fight he has shown in days, and so is a good thing in some ways.

Update: Bree insists both kits are black and white. She's a vet; she wins this one.

Life and Death in Minature

The Four Kittens
Originally uploaded by Noel Welsh.

About 2 weeks ago Bree brought home some kittens that had been found behind a shop. They needed socialisation, and looking after; if they stayed at the RSPCA they'd probably get ill and the nurses wouldn't have enough time to give them the attention they need. As we took last week off to fix up things around the house it seemed like a good fit.

You can see them in that photo looking very adorable. Now, two of them are dead, and one is slowly recovering from illness. It has been harrowing. One night we stayed up to 3AM nursing one of them; an hour later it had died.

The Definition of Finite-State Controllers

I'm working my way through Reinforcement Learning by Policy Search and I've come across one quirk in the definition of finite-state controllers. To me the natural definition is a straight forward extension of a reactive policy. A reactive policy maps an observation to an action. The straight forward extension to include an internal memory would be to map observation and current internal state to an action. Peshkin's definition maps current internal state to an action, ignoring the observation. He notes that this can emulate my scheme by increasing the number of internal states so you have one per 'real' memory state and observation pair. I'm not sure there is any particular advantage to either scheme, though his will have less parameters for the same number of internal states as mine. He does incorrectly state that in his scheme the degenerate case with a single internal state is a reactive policy. That is not so, though it is in my scheme.

First Post!

W00t. The first post on my blog. The purpose of this blog is to document my research, mostly for my own amusement, and to document my life, for the amusement of friends and family. Web development topics are covered on Untyping. From time to time this blog will contain deep-thought, but that is not a mandatory requirement for posting. Why Blogger? I didn't feel like using Moveable Type, I wanted to see what a big web-based app offered, and, yeah, I was too lazy to set up something different.