Unfinished business

category: Personal stuff
by michiel,

I always have so much unfinished business, not only in my programming tasks, by the way. Luckily at work, there is a manager breathing down my neck, but at home sometimes I wished I had someone to whip my back whenever I 'forget' about a pet project.

Here's a list of the programs I always wanted to write, but were afraid to finish:

The cube-solver. I always wanted to write a program that would solve the Rubik's cube. And I haven't. Of course my ambitious goal was it to be Artificially ~~Flavoured~~ Intelligent, so it could solve it without the tedious job of me typing in the solution. In fact Cyrill Castella has done just such a thing. And though credit goes to him I am amazed.
The neural network. In my crazy days I thought I could make money if my neural network program could just predict the stock exchange future. I never got the hang of neural nets and I still don't. If someone is so kind to explain them in a language my 3 year old nephew could understand I'd be glad to listen.
Ligretto. At one point, when I was about 28, me and my girl Anne were both addicted to Ligretto. I am sure that if you try it out, you'd be addicted too. And actually, I did program the basics once (an animated game played by the computer against itself), one night when I stayed up until dawn. Of course, when dawn comes, I am usually so tired and my brain is so messed up that I usually mess up. I accidentally deleted the program. Yes you heard it right. I never got it back.
My own home page. Now I must say, I have had a home page in the past. It's just never been the professional looking, feature packed website that I envisioned. The page you're looking at now is the closest thing.

Things I actually did finish, but which took me a very long time:

The ultimate maze-finder. A genetic algorithm that could find it's way out of any complex maze, without being told how.
Lingo. This is the famous 5 (or 6) letter word finding game.
RubikTimerTalks, the talking stopwatch. I don't like looking at the screen when I am cubing, so I wrote something that actually tells me how far along I am.

Things I am "working" on

The cube profiles for Dan
RubikTimer.NET, a new version of RubikTimer. I hope to actually get somewhere with it.
The cube study page, a web page where you can study algorithms

And of course I've always wanted to write a novel, and I have several unfinished once lying around....

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