Secret Research Project 1: Interesting Facts

Now that the research report has been completed and submitted, I have some time to share some interesting facts about the research.

1. When people ask what I do for my secret research, I say I download images of apples, bananas, irons, scientific calculators, suitcases, crayons, dustbins, pears, plastic bottles, tissue boxes, forks, spoons, laptops, clocks, pillows and blenders.
2. I now possess a large collection of images of apples, bananas, irons, scientific calculators, suitcases, crayons, dustbins, pears, plastic bottles, tissue boxes, forks, spoons, laptops, clocks, pillows and blenders. Much time was spent to collect and download these images.
3. For the preliminary versions of the classifier, the classifier achieved a classification rate of 70%. Coincidentally, the training set consisted of 70% natural images and 30% synthetic images.
4. For the uninformed, point 3 was a consequence of the classifier labeling everything as a natural image, hence achieving a 70% performance. This approach is excellent. By increasing the set of natural images to 99%, the performance can be boosted to 99% !
5. Point 4 was a joke.
6. The trusty Microsoft Paint was used to perform many tasks for the project. These tasks include converting GIF, PNG, and BMP images into JPEG format, and creating diagrams for the final report.
   
7. Two computers were used for the project. The project could be run exclusively on either the desktop or the laptop computer, but using two computers greatly increase rate of work.
8. The increase in rate of work was not due to being able to run multiple simulations simultaneously. Rather, the simulations were mostly done on one computer (the laptop), while the other (the desktop) was used for net research and report writing. Useful work was done on the desktop while the MATLAB program ran on the laptop.
9. Using two computers was also cool for report writing. All the data and related papers were displayed on the laptop screen, while the desktop ran only Word. Information could be directly read from the laptop and entered into the report without ALT-TABBING and changing windows constantly.
   
10. I want a dual monitor setup after learning the advantages of point 9.
11. I want a dual core system to be able to run my (hypothetical) dual monitor system properly without lagging. This is also to make running simulations less of a pain.
12. MATLAB should perform some checks on code integrity before running. Many times, MATLAB would return an error after it had run much of the simulation processing. The error was a simple formatting error located at the last few lines of the code.

More information on the image classifier will be released if anyone is interested.

Secret Research Project 1: Quick Update

I'm just dropping by to release some of the latest results for the graphics classifier.

Classifier	SR	NR	AR	Time Taken
C1	85.44 %	69.86 %	77.65 %	37.4 s
C2	87.67%	72.69 %	80.14 %	38.2 s
C3	86.95 %	74.51 %	80.73 %	38.5 s
C4	86.00 %	76.21 %	81.11 %	38.4 s

Notes:
SR, NR = Recall rates for synthetic and natural images. AR = average recall rate.
C1~C4 are classifiers employing some set of metrics.

I'm going to sleep soon. The only reason I'm awake at this hour is to finish my research report, which is now at 37 pages. I'm still missing the discussion and conclusion chapters, as well as a third of the introduction. Work also has to be done on the formatting of the report.

I'm hoping I can mop up the remaining work by noon tomorrow later, since I still have another secret research report to complete by Friday.

I'll release more information and results on the Synthetic and Natural Image Classifier (that's the official name of the thingy) when I'm extremely free. That would be next Tuesday.

[25/04/08] Errors in the calculations were found and corrected.

Secret Research Project 1: Graphics Classifier

One of the 'secret research projects' I'm working on currently is a graphics classifier. Basically, the aim of the research is to build a classifier capable of differentiating between a graphics image and a realistic image.

To be clearer, a graphics image is an image which is artificial. This type of image is not directly captured from the physical environment. Hence, drawings, paintings, cartoons and clipart are considered to be graphics images.

On the other hand, realistic images are images which are directly captured from the physical environment. In other words, these are photographs of real objects.

A sample of a realistic image and a graphics image is shown below.

Left : Graphics Image
Below: Realistic Image

I'm now using simple metrics to metrify the images. According to intuition, graphics and realistic images will have different metrics, hence enabling me to clasify them. Some metrics that I have adopted, and the assumptions behind them, are:

Saturation Metric: Graphics, especially computer generated ones, tend to have higher saturation values compared to photographs, which are invariably less saturated (more faded/dull) due to natural effects.

Number of Colors Metric: Graphics tend to be composed of a small palette of colors compared to realistic images, which tend to occupy much of the spectrum.

I've also used a number of other metrics, but I'll share those at a later point of time. In any case, the effectiveness of the existing metrics are reasonable, but not spectacular, achieving only about a 60~70% correct classification rate.

However, by combining the different metrics into a single classifier system (aka boosting), I expect the performance of the system to improve.

More updates on the secret project will come later.

Cursor*10

I found a game with a very unique and interesting gameplay, one which was so fresh that I had never seen before. I was so impressed by the game that I had to introduce it here.
I can't reveal much about the game without spoiling it. All that I can say is that the game requires you to "Cooperate by oneself ?!".

By the way, my (unimpressive) high score is 139. It is probably easy to beat this, but I don't want to click madly again.

Hope everyone enjoys this short game.

Test your Induction

The following sequence of three characters obeys a certain secret rule.

2, 4, 6

Your task is to infer the secret rule. To help you to discover the secret rule, you can produce any number of three character sequences for testing. I will then reply whether the produced sequence(s) obey the secret rule. (Pls try to propose sequences only in the tagboard; I will update the tested sequences in this post.)

As you can propose any number of character sequences for testing, you should only attempt to report the secret rule when you are absolutely sure that you have the correct rule in mind. To keep the game suspenseful, post rules only in the comments.

Why are the Month Lengths Irregular?

I consider the lengths of the months to be irregular. I came to this conclusion after I asked myself the question, "How would I distribute the 365 day calendar into 12 months ?".

My (intuitive) solution was to divide 365 by 12. This leaves 30 days per month, with 5 days left over. A reasonable split would be 7 months of 30 days, and 5 months of 31 days. Regarding the ordering of the months, I considered 2 ways. The first would be to place the 5 odd months at an end of the calendar (either the front or the back). However, after some consideration, I felt that this method, while being easy to remember, seemed unsymmetric, and might leave the halves of the calender unbalanced. My second idea was to alternate the long and short months. The last 3 months would be short.

The resulting calender would be : 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 30, 30.

Evidently, this is quite different from the current form of the calendar. The current calendar has 7 months with 31 days, 5 months with 30 days, and 1 month with 29 days. This is clearly an arbitary arrangement of days. This leads me to the conclusion that the calender was not created and imposed at a single moment in history by a single planner or authority, but rather the result of a series of incremental changes.

Here's how I hypothesise the calendar came about (based on pure speculation alone):

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Original creator : Let's make a 365 day calendar with 12 months ! The calendar should be symmetric around the center.
Result : 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31

Problems : 366 day calendar.
Solution : Borrow 1 day from some random month.
Result : 31, 29, 31, 30, 31, 30, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31

After some time : Hey let's make this month longer ! For no reason !
Result : 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31

Problems : 366 days again ! You clown !
Solution : Pick on the loser month with 29 days. Easier to recall which month is odd.
Result : Existing calendar.

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Of course, the previous speculation was utter nonsense. However, I do believe that the present calendar was slowly morphed from a predecessor calendar slowly. The gradual changes were implemented such that the newer calendars would be minimally different from the earlier calendars. In other words, if they added a day to another month, and needed to remove a day from an existing month, the best candiate would be a month which was already an oddity.

Perhaps that is why February is such a 'loser' month. It's at least 2 whole days shorter than everyone else, and even at it's best it's still shorter by 1 day. It must have been the victim of multiple 'shortenings' !

Simplicity

Occam's razor, expressed as "Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred", emphasizes simplicity over complexity. Yet, what is simplicity ? I suspect that there can be no answer to the question (or, rather, no simple answer to the question).

Simplicity is a concept that is dependent on the viewer, and different viewers would have differing ideas of the simple. Unfortunately, due to the mental and psychological similarities between most humans, this fact is not immediately obvious. Given two differing items, most people would agree on which is simpler. For example, most people would find the equation "2 X 2 = 4" as a simpler variant of the phrase "Integral of 2 over the bounds of 0 to 2". And yet, for a hypothetical person who was taught calculus before arithmetic, the reverse would be true. Hence, simplicity is really dependent on the viewer.