Education, Life, Music

"The Hard Way is the Right Way"

While the Europe is paralyzed by the volcanic ash and I am restrained from coming back to Cambridge, here is a quick recap of what I have been doing for the past couple of months.

1. Guitar

It looks like it is becoming a tradition - another vacation ends with a guitar video. This time - a short slow blues in Stefan Grossman's style. The usual apologies for the sound, video and playing quality apply.

Slow blues in E (Sefan Grossman's style).

2. Professional

I was accepted as a student member to the Chartered Institute for IT (former British Computer Society). For the next two years (at least) I should be reachable through this e-mail: manfredas.zabarauskas@bcs.org.

3. Studies

Without getting into the gory details, the outcomes of the Lent (read: second) term in Cambridge can be summarized by:

Mandelbrot set (1280x1024)

a wallpaper "spit out" by ML depicting a rather standard Mandelbrot set fractal (on the right),
an animation "spit out" by Java depicting eight-hundred generations of the spacefiller pattern in the Conway's Game of Life (further on the right),
and an insane amount of material to prepare for the upcoming exams; both broad and not as shallow as I expected.

I am still extremely enjoying it, even though the amount of my spare-time has decreased. (As an afterthought - I still had time to play basketball for Blues, Lions and my college, so maybe it was not that bad).

4. Internship

Over the summer I will be working as a Technology Analyst for Morgan Stanley, in their Innovative Data, Environments, Analytics & Systems (IDEAS) group.

During the interviews Morgan Stanley really left a very good impression both at the level of knowledge of the people working there and the communication and culture inside the company. We will see if that applies in day-to-day situations. In any case, I have nothing against spending the summer in Canary Wharf and seeing the investment banking industry from inside.

It will surely give me more things to write about in this blog, so be sure to check back once in a while.

Competition: internship offer packs from Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

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Don't
move!

Development, Education

Conway's Game of Life

1. Description

In 1970s John Horton Conway (British mathematician and University of Cambridge graduate) opened a whole new field of mathematical research by publishing a revolutionary paper on the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Suffice it to say that the game which he has described with four simple rules has the power of a universal Turing machine, i.e. anything that can be computed algorithmically can be computed within Conway's Game of Life (outlines of a proof for given by Berlekamp et al; implemented by Chapman as a universal register machine within the Game of Life in 2002).

Glider in the Game of Life

The Game of Life is a zero-player game, i.e. the player interacts only by creating an initial configuration on a two-dimensional grid of square cells and then observing how it evolves. Every new generation of cells (which can be either live or dead) is a pure function of the previous generation and is described by this set of rules:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

For more information, patterns and current news about the research involving Game of Life check out the brilliant LifeWiki at conwaylife.com.

2. Implementation

The following applet visualising the Game of Life has been developed as part of the coursework for Object-Oriented Programming at the University of Cambridge, all code was written and compiled in Sun's Java SE 1.6.

Click on any of the screenshots or the button below to launch the Game of Life (and if nothing shows up, make sure that you have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed).

Game of Life Implementation by Manfredas Zabarauskas

Spacefiller (Game of Life applet)

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