Currently Listening to: Muse: The Resistance

When I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum a while back Best Buy gave me a $10 gift card, so I used it today to pick up the latest Muse album, "The Resistance". It's definitely on par with their other works, though I think "Absolution" remains my favorite of theirs. The songs all pop with that slightly electronic sound that reminds me of robots, along with their signature harmonies. This album is what would happen if Rush's 2112 album got together and had a baby with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, and that baby got together with an awesome robot and had a baby. Yes, its truly that good.

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Indie Gaming: Canabalt

So last night during my travels across the internet, I came upon a fantastically addictive browser game called Canabalt. Its a great indie project that was created for the Experimental Gameplay Project's monthly theme, "Bare Minimum". The game was made in less than a week, displays all its graphics in only six colors, and only uses one button to play.
The game is set during an alien invasion, and you play as a businessman making a daring escape from the city, running and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Its super addicting, and the music is pretty awesome too, a techno track that was also created to fit the minimalist approach.

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Fall Semester, Batman, Mastering Olypmus

Well fall semester has started, and I've been enjoying my classes for the most part so far. My favorite is Intro to Oceanography, which looks like it will be a really easy one. I'm also taking Chemistry, although I couldn't get into a lab so I'm only doing the lecture this semester. It is really interesting but it looks like it will come to some hard work eventually, as memorizing the molecules and stuff might be complicated.

For those of you wondering about the results of my summer precalc class, I'm sorry to say that I did not put enough effort into it and I will have to retake it this semester. The fast pace of summer was something I just couldn't keep up with, and it especially didn't help that I am a huge slacker in the first place.

Classes take up most of my time nowadays but I got my hands on a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum , and I must say that it is one of the best games I've played this year, and its definitely got my vote for game of the year 2009... although I'll wait to cast a final verdict until I've played Dragon Age: Origins (I'm a huge Bioware fan if you didn't know) and The Beatles Rockband (also a HUGE Beatles fan).

An awesome game

Continuing my retro gaming that started with FFVIII (which has unfortunately taken a backseat to Batman at the moment), I've been sinking quite a bit of time into an old favorite: Zeus- Master of Olympus, a city builder from Impressions Games, which is now Tilted Mill. Its your basic city-builder where you conquer the mythical  world of ancient Greece. Its really cool to play now that I've actually been to Greece though, and seen the ruins of some of the cities that I've built in the game.

A picture I took of the ruins of Mycenae

What else has gone on in my life since my last update ages ago... hm, oh yes, I've learned a new song on my acoustic: Norwegian Wood, off of the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. Such a great song.

I'll try to keep this blog updated fairly frequently even though I'm pretty sure that nobody reads it...
Until next time, peace.

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Math is Hard

So remember that "Mersenne Prime Number Finder" that I talked about in my last post? Well as some of you have noticed it does not find Mersenne primes at all. It just finds regular old Mersenne numbers, which are of the form 2^n-1. Being a Mersenne number does not guarantee primality obviously, as the program returned results such as 15.

Thanks to the help of CRGreathouse, a moderator at Math Forum, I've realized these mistakes.

So, my goal is to find Mersenne Primes. I'm half-way there by finding regular Mrsn numbers... and luckily there is a thing known as the Lucas-Lehmer Primality Test, which applies only to Mrsn numbers. So now I have to find a way to implement this test into my program and I should be finding primes in no time!

CRGreathouse also introduced me to a programming language that is more suitable for numbers and mathematical operations than Java: Pari/GP. It is actually quite similar to Java in respect to syntax, but it handles numbers much more easily. Hopefully I'll be able to write my program soon! I have quite a bit to do today though and I'm working for most of the weekend, sadly.

Next week I'll have plenty of free time though, since I'm officially and finally done with summer classes. I'm not 100% sure that I passed Pre-calc... I did less than average on most of the quizzes and tests. I have no one to blame but myself, but this is just wrong. Here I am doing a math project in my spare time and yet I can't put forth the effort to pass a class? I don't lack the ability to understand the concepts, and I have an interest in math, but... I guess my fault lies in that I don't have an interest in doing homework. Oh well, as of now I'm still scheduled to take Calc I in fall semester, so hopefully that doesn't fall through even if I don't pass. I do NOT want to retake precalc and sit through 15 weeks of the same stuff I just learned.

Haha, well here's to slacking off and getting nowhere!

-Cheers!

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Prime Numbers

Have you ever had one of those days when you wake up thinking about prime numbers?

Of course you have! Everyone has! Today, that was me. I rolled out of bed and stumbled over to my computer to find out about prime numbers.

For those of you unacquainted with theoretical mathematics, a prime number is a natural number that can only be divided by itself and 1. Here's more information about prime numbers if you are interested.

Anyways, its theorized that there are an infinite number of primes. When they start getting larger, you run into numbers known as Mersenne Primes. These are prime numbers that can be expressed in the form (2^n)-1. It was these prime numbers that grabbed my attention this morning. I wondered just what some of these numbers were, and the fact that there are lots of people trying to find larger and larger Mersenne Primes intruiged me. I thought to myself, "Why, if they can do it, so can I!"

So I set about writing a simple program in Java. It asks the user how many Mersenne Primes they would like to find and then spits out all the numbers of the form (2^n)-1. The problem is that in Java, there is a limit to how big a number value can be, and when dealing with java's basic exponent function (java.lang.Math.pow(x,y);) this peaks at the value limit for integers. Therfore the most Mersenne Primes you can find with my program is 30.

So here are the first 30 Mersenne Primes (1 is on the list but I don't count it because I know its not a prime number):

1

3

7

15

31

63

127

255

511

1023

2047

4095

8191

16383

32767

65535

131071

262143

524287

1048575

2097151

4194303

8388607

16777215

33554431

67108863

134217727

268435455

536870911

1073741823

2147483647

My code:

/* Prime Number Finder

* Created by Tyler Ash

* (c) August 12 2009

* --------------------

* Searches for prime numbers within a user defined amount of numbers starting at 1.

*/

import java.util.Scanner;

public class PrimeFinder

{

public static void main(String args [])

{

int a = 1;

double k;

int n;

Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);

System.out.println("Welcome to Mersenne Prime Number Finder. This program searches for Mersenne primes within a given amount of numbers, starting at 1.\nHow many numbers do you want to search?\n");

n = input.nextInt();

if (n<1)

{

System.out.println("Please enter a number greater than 1.\n");

n= input.nextInt();

}

while(a<=n)

{

k= java.lang.Math.pow(2,a)-1;

System.out.println((int)k);

a++;

}

System.out.println("\nSearch for the first " + n +" Mersenne Prime Numbers competed.");

}

}

Oh, and I got a haircut today.

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Not Good at Goodbyes

I had to say goodbye to my girlfriend this morning as she left for school in Chicago. We did a lot of fun stuff over the summer, but its hard to know that there won't be any more hugs or kisses for a long time. We talk online or call eachother every night, and I randomly send flowers to her dorm address to let her know I'm thinking of her.

Chicago is such a cool city- I'm jealous. Its good to have an excuse to visit the Windy City though!

This was just a short post, but I wanted to say what has been in my mind all day.

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Dungeons & Dragons

Recently I've had the pleasure of playing in my friend's Dungeons and Dragons game. Its a 10th- level adventure called "Touch of Madness." There is a group of 6 or 7 of us, and we've been able to get together for two sessions so far.

The adventure so far has been cool- it started off with a bang, throwing our characters into a pitched battle against some ferocious Grells (floating, tentacled brain- monsters). My character is a 10th- level Deva Wizard named Tavar Deathgaze. Pretty sweet, I know. Fourth edition is cool, and we were able to make use of the DnD Insider tools to make our characters, but this adventure is the first game of DnD for several people at the table, so I think that starting off at 10th level was not such a great idea. The powers and abilities at first level are still pretty cool. Being at such a high level with so many different abilities and powers and no idea of how to use them has definetly caused the party to move very slowly. In our two sessions we've managed to get through only two encounters. Our party has only now finally come to the Forlorn Tower- the first dungeon in the adventure.

I've got to give props to our DM though. He's got a lot of patience to be able to deal with the group of us. We have a problem of just talking and going off-topic and debating this and that detail of the game. Only one other person and I have experience playing aside from the DM, so we often have to help focus the game. The other experienced player actually pulled me aside and invited me to play another game with other experienced players later this week. It would be fun to join a game like that, even if only for a one-shot.

My core rulebooks for 4E DnD. Oh, what's that? A natural twenty? Yes sir.

This experience of actually playing has given me hope. I started writing a 4th-ed adventure last winter, and now I've given some thought to completing it because I think it might be possible to get a group together and give DM-ing a shot.

We'll see. I also want to finish my NWN mod, which I have been slowly but surely working on piece by piece over the last week or so.

I still have a few more math classes to go, so I need to focus on that for now. Hopefully I get a good enough grade to move on to Calc I in the fall semester.

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