Jordan Perr

I just found out that my year long research project on the trends in Integrated Information in evolving neural networks has been accepted into the NYCSEF (New York City Science and Engineering Fair) final round at the Museum of Natural History.

The preliminary round took place last Sunday (3/7/10). This round included live, interrogation style judging by three separate judges. I am honored that they were impressed with my work.

Bresenham’s line algorithm is the best known way to render a continuous and straight line through a raster display. I started out allowing floating point operations, but quickly decided to implement the algorithm using only integers. I didn’t like the online explanations and tutorials of the algo, so I decided to write something that I conceptually understood. View my code here.

My algorithm works by increasing an “error” variable by y0 – y1 every iteration. Should the error ever rise above x0-x1, the error is decreased by x0 – x1 and the drawn Y value is increased by 1.

I decided to lighten up my rather industrial looking brick wall with a splash of color. Literally. I’m not completely sure if my landlords will be happy with it, but paint isn’t that hard to scrape off!

Zlata and I have put in close to 6 hours on the mural so far. I can’t wait for school finals to be over so that we can continue.

I was recently exposed to the fascinating visual and auditory art of David Lynch. His 1990 film “Wild At Heart” struck a chord with me with it’s array of outcast characters and it’s foray into the darker and more insane side of human social behavior. I am making an effort to watch more of Lynch’s creations.

I have been given the responsibility of redesigning and rewriting Stuyvesant High School’s computer science website (cs.stuy.edu).

We are leaning towards writing a bare-bones server using Python’s WSGI specification. The specifics are still being worked out, but this new web presence will need to:

• Serve a “presentable” site to the public complete with teacher bios, course descriptions, syllabus, and possibly a calendar.
• Serve special class pages with editable sections and some sort of source code browser to authenticated users.

Since every teacher at Stuy would rather edit files in Emacs than bother with a buggy AJAX admin interface, most configuration and static content will be kept in plain-text files. Again, the specifics have not been worked out. More to come!

I have completed a research paper on the how integrated information behaves during artificial evolution of neural networks in Polyworld. Mad props to Virgil Griffith (with his integrated information calculator) and Larry Yeager (author of the aforementioned Polyworld) for their incredible insight and willingness to help out a mere high school student.

Download the full paper as PDF (400k)

Abstract:

Evolution has proven to be a wildly successful autonomous process for creating intelligent systems in the natural world and in simulation. Since the early 1960s, re- searchers have used artificial evolution to find ingenious and novel solutions to complex problems such as series prediction and flight control. Recently, artificial evolution has been applied to neural networks with the aim of evolving more robust artificial intel- ligence. Several metrics have been proposed to chart the emergence of intelligence in these evolved networks. This work analyzes the behavior of a new metric, integrated information (φ). Observed data is analyzed, interpreted, and compared to more con- ventional properties of the artificial neural network. The data analysis shows that φ increases over evolutionary time and is therefore promising as a heuristic measure.

Experimental Data:

A necessary but mundane task of programming any vehicle’s autonomous drive system is filtering the noise out of encoder and accelerometer sensory data. To demonstrate the noisiness of our sensors to the rest of the FRC team, I decided to create visual aids using Microsoft Excel. The following graph shows both sets of data over time during smooth acceleration and deceleration.

After an entire christmas vacation’s worth of PHP and Javascript wrangling, Daryl and I finished the 2008 Stuypulse website!

The new site contains a novel CMS developed from scratch. Using a seamless interface, team members can add and edit pages and subpages to an infinite depth, create and display custom “widgets” for both sidebars, and easily update header and footer information. Integration with our existing SMF forum login system means that team members can use their forum credentials to log into the CMS.

Harvey Citron wanted a Flashy new site to show off his amazing custom guitars and basses. Keeping with the “film strip” design of his previous site, I created a general swf file that loads images dynamically from a MYSQL database. This is the first dynamic Flash app I have ever made.

I wrote a nifty little administrative interface that allows Harvey to add instruments, delete them, and modify them. He can also change any other static looking page on the site. No framework was used, just raw PHP.

I have been maintaining my mother’s freelance web presence since 2002. The current iteration of her site(s) feature some statically loaded flash content and simple JavaScript rollovers.

• janetperr.com
• yiddishfordogs.com
• hiphopfordogs.com
• yiddishforbabies.com