I’m a bit of a Pacman fan so when I came across the Pacman Kata in the Kata Catalogue I was hooked: Pacman finds himself in a grid filled with monsters. Will he be able to eat all the dots on the board before the monsters eat him? Back in early 2012 we ran a Pacman Kata at the F#unctional Londoners meetup where you start with a maze and sprites and your task is to write a simple AI. After the event I extended the sample to run on Windows 8, Windows Phone as well as Silverlight and WPF, and somehow go[...]

The machine learning theme continues to be popular at the F#unctional Londoners meetup group. Last night Matt Moloney gave a great hands on session on k-means clustering. Matt has worked on large machine learning systems at e-Bay. More recently he has been working on the Tsunami IDE, an extensible REPL environment for the desktop and cloud. Tsunami provides a lightweight environment focused on interactive development, very suited to machine learning. And with F# 3 Type Providers you get typed access to a[...]

From the window at the office I’ve seen a series of futuristic buildings erected, first the Gherkin, then the Shard and now the Walkie Talkie:   The last one being recently been re-dubbed the Walkie Scorchie as it produces a supercharged solar ‘death ray’ that has burned holes in carpets, melted furniture and even the interior of a Jaguar parked nearby. It feels almost reminiscent of the dystopian future portrayed in the cult film Idiocracy: Though our current society is probably closer to the surve[...]

There are a lot of interesting programming languages out there, but downloading and setting up the environment can be very time consuming when you just want to try one out. The good news is that you can try out many languages in your browser straight away, often with tutorials which guide you through the basics. Following the pattern of 7 languages in 7 weeks book, here’s a somewhat abridged version. Dynamic Languages Fed up of long compile times, want a lightweight environment for scripting? Dynamic [...]

Last night I gave a talk at the F#unctional Londoners meetup about my experiences working in a team building a game in a day at the recent London GameCraft game jam event. We went with a continuous runner and used XNA to build the game on Windows with a hack to get it working on Visual Studio 2012, then Neil Danson was able to port it to iOS and Android using MonoGame. I brought along an Apple iPad and Google Nexus 7 both happily running the game. Building a game in a day from ptrelford iOS and An[...]