Joby Elliott

• I spent a lot of the last few days off the grid, and didn't get much concrete lines-of-code-written sort of stuff done on my project.
• It did give me a lot of brain cycles to read well for the iron reader though.
• Still working on nest-seeking atoms (in the form of a generic beacon-reading quark)
• Trying to stop thinking about bonds and cell walls.
• Maybe I should have done bonds for my project.
• Having some ideas about how to use oscillators in beacons, but:
  • I probably (definitely) don't have the bits in my budget
  • It's probably a bad idea in general, because the beacons being unsynchronized gives them the unexpected bonus of creating paths around areas with exceptionally slow time, and synchronizing them would break that.
• Also thinking about how seekers should keep a rolling average sort of opinion about what direction signals are from, so they can handle those cases where a beacon signal wrapped around an obstruction and hit itself. If I don't introduce some inertia and/or randomness to how beacon following elements behave they could conceivably get stuck walking back and forth in that type of area.

• I've got a generic Beacon template and default quark built from it. It works for recording the direction a signal came from, and tracks three channels separately, so it can point the way to three things.
• Building all beacons from one base quark is working well, because it makes everything I'm building out of it interoperable.
• I've expanded that into an element that acts as a beacon and tries to spawn copies of itself so that it always has a beacon of some kind in every cardinal direction.
• I have a couple “nest” elements that also act as beacons, but broadcast to beacons around them on two of the three channels.
• My first test is going to be building atoms that spawn other atoms that try to find their way to a nest. Now that the guts of the beacons is working, I should be able to get that working tomorrow and have something relatively interesting to show and tell in class this week.
• For now I'm looking to get a baseline gut feeling of how well it works with stationary beacons, and then move onto using moving beacons.

• This weekend I did the reading on the paper, and played around a little with the sandpile element
• I also looked up how HSV to RGB conversion works, because I really want to be able to work with colors in HSV. I might actually look into adding HSV/RGB conversion functions to ColorUtils. It's a small thing, but I keep wishing I had it.
• I generally did not get as much done this weekend as I would have hoped – I kind of just spent my entire weekend on endless computer and network problems instead.

• worked on building a better sandpile element, with methods to use for toppling grains
• the idea is to use a consistent interface to build new things on top of the toppling, in particular I have this crazy idea of using topple events to propagate messages
• `ulam -i` is my favorite thing this weekend

• updated my wiki pages to make it all a little easier to follow, finally added a work log