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Tuesday, Oct 26, 2010 - 23:33 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Bored Board

PPPP SSSS-ed

Not strictly true, as I still have two module projects on my hands (both partially done, at least, with a few weeks to go). Still, work's work, and programming as work is somehow not always as pleasurable as programming as a hobby, regardless of the difficulty involved. My heart and eyes therefore roved, and fixated on the reference problem.

As any Honours year student should know, reading up on references is an integral part of the research process. Getting the reference text may not be so straightforward, though probably more convenient at this time than any other, since most recent research is available online. Some papers are not publicly available, being hidden within a publisher's subscription service, but many are.

Then, a couple of the common problems that one might be faced with on encountering a reference list are:
  • Searching for a copy of the referenced text
  • Determining which of the references are the most important (since time is limited)
While, to be honest, I'm not sure if researchers voraciously read each and every reference they can lay their hands on, there's no downside to having a copy of the material on hand for a quick browse, rather than having to fire up a web browser each time some follow-up is required. Wouldn't it be nice to have an application that:
  1. Takes in a paper in PDF format as input
  2. Extracts all the references
  3. Lists all references with a link to their publisher, and a citation count
  4. Automatically downloads reference papers that are freely available
  5. (Not yet done) Repeat this process for each downloaded paper, up to a number of levels, to form a tree (or more likely, mesh) of papers associated with the subject
It shouldn't be too hard, and it wasn't. Using Perl, each of the four sub-tasks above can be solved using:
  1. The CAM::PDF module (use the asciify function). It's not quite perfect, with text sometimes stuck togetherlikethis, but adequate
  2. Some simple pattern recognition. It helps that most papers follow an accepted citation style
  3. We can ask Google Scholar for this information
  4. Just use LWP::Simple (optionally add Term::ProgressBar for indication of download progress)

Quick References (Larger version)


Compilation into an executable was done using Cava Packager, which has worked like a charm so far.

PPPP (Practical PaPer Puller) is far from complete - it only supports one citation style now, for instance - but it should be okay as a proof-of-concept.

...

Who am I kidding? Obviously it can be done. A better question might be why it hasn't been done (at least in a public way). One possible answer is that officially speaking, Google Scholar (and indeed, Google itself) does not allow access to automated bots (though the Googlebot roams the world, but to be fair most websites want the Googlebot to visit). This is the reason why those pesky "automated queries" captchas pop up from time to time, even when one is doing nothing of the sort (perhaps the IP has been spoofed?).

Alright, pumping thousands of requests per second is abusive, but what about one request every ten seconds? Technically, also cannot. But I can't find anything against hiring somebody to manually enter the search terms (every ten seconds or less) and save the HTML source, so make of that what you will; welcome to the brave new economy where information may be duplicated at no cost, is not supposed to be copied so, but which cannot fundamentally be made uncopyable.

That's it for PPPP for now, then.


Boards

Watched Paranormal Activity 2 on Saturday night. The original was touted (on its own poster) as "one of the scariest movies of all time", but on this evidence... I dunno. The following comments are slightly spoilerly, but in this case I don't think it will affect subsequent viewing pleasure much.

  • Pool cleaners are especially vulnerable to demonic possession
  • Half-an-hour of watching a pool cleaner supposedly crawling out of the side of the pool each night, only to be thrown back in the next day, beggars suspense
  • Hell doesn't have much truck with gender equality yet - only a first-born son will do, daughters not be damned
  • A baby mobile turning by itself is supposed to be scary. It's the context, I guess
  • Ditto with people appearing and disappearing after you turn away. My hamsters do that all the time
  • Pans dropping loudly and cabinet doors exploding outwards all at once is supposed to be scary. Alright, it was. In much the way that screamers are
  • Sequels have to cost more than the original. Specifically, 200 times more (US$3M vs. US$15k)
Somebody should really have rigged one of the speakers in the cinema such that it would noisily drop off once the credits finish playing - immersive entertainment, I call it.

The movie paled in comparism to the sight of a group of loud, mostly male angmos at Raffles Place MRT, which would not have been worth a mention had they not been dressed in red dresses and lingerie. I put on my best faux dispassionate New Yorker poker face, only to discover that it looked almost exactly like my normal one. To add to that, after the group got onto the train, someone pressed the emergency button. Singapore's getting more lively and fun nowadays.

Well, we kicked off with Colossal Arena. I don't get why people say it's similar to Magic: The Gathering - it plays completely differently. What happens is that eight cards representing eight creatures are placed, and players can adjust the power of each of those creatures by placing appropriate cards, and also bet on them to survive to the end of the fifth round (each round, the creature with the lowest power is eliminated).

The key appears to "ally" with other players to an extent, by placing some bets on the same creatures. Anyhow, it didn't quite grab me.

Continued with Small World, a more interesting title; it reminded me a bit of Civilization, and seeing that it is a remake of Vinci, a Civ-type game if there ever was one, I would say that's understandable.

It plays very similarly to Risk, where the idea is to take over territories with armies. However, in Small World, each player controls a fantasy race with an attached special power (with 280 unique combinations in the base game). For example, I began with the Forest Wizards, who get an extra victory point each turn for each forest they control, and another for each magic source (obviously I went straight for the forest with a magic source).

The objective is to have the most victory points at the end of the game, and the basic way to get them is to occupy territories (one point per territory occupied at the end of the turn). Territories are occupied by placing 2+number of any opponent tokens+number of other stuff like mountains and forts tokens on them, and the number of tokens that a player has is determined by the race/power combination they pick. These combinations are randomly arranged in a queue, and players can choose to skip off less powerful combinations by paying one victory point token on each combination they skip (i.e. a bidding mechanism)

The flagship mechanic of the game is however the option to go into decline, which takes one full turn, but allows the player to leave one of each of their now-declined race's tokens on each territory that is already occupied, and select a new race to begin with. Almost every player should go into decline at some point, since it allows them to have rather more than one race's worth of tokens (and since tokens are slowly lost through warfare [with a few exceptions], the potential for each race to occupy territory is reduced over time)

Should be worth another go next time.

[N.B. Sel later pointed out that this game is available on the VASSAL engine. Not sure if online play can replicate the atmosphere, though]

[N.N.B. According to the Wall Street Journal, mahjong is making a comeback in America. The cycle comes full circle]



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