Monthly Archives: March 2006

Menacing updated

I’ve updated Menacing with some rather cool features. It is now rather refactored, has fine-tuned --debug messages, an --init mode so you don’t have to save a dumb matchbox to the same folder, and a spanking new --train [iterations] feature that allows you to train the matchboxes using a bare-minimum intelligent computer trainer (Thanks spacecro). And it’s rather good too. A --train 5000 for instance, produces a nearly unbeatable matchbox combo. This is at version 0.9, and almost 1-oh ready. If there are more feature requests, please mention em here.

Menacing: A MENACE emulator

Rather inspired by today’s Neural Networks exam, and Anoop’s amazing tutoring on the topic, I created a simple MENACE emulator in Python. Both the source and the Win executable are available below, and licensed under an MIT/Academic Free License. In other words, do anything you want with it, and try to give me credit 🙂

A simple menacing in a console would show you a tic-tac-toe board with a player choice to make. menacing --state shows the current state of the matchboxes. menacing --debug shows how the program thinks as it plays the game. menacing --train [iterations] allows you to train the matchboxes using a computer vs. computer mode.

If you download the Windows executable bundle, go to the dist folder to find menacing.exe. It’s a console application, so you’ll have to run cmd.exe, navigate to this folder and then execute it for maximum satisfaction. If you’re downloading the source, run menacing --init first.

I’d love it if you post your experiences with menacing here. Thanks 🙂

How do you train it from a dumb saved matchbox? Initially play to lose (say for about 10 tries, and then play to win always, I find this to be the best method to train). Or use --train and your work is done for you 🙂

Learn more about MENACE here and here.

The Windows bundle is slightly out of date as of this posting, should be resolved soon. So get the source for the latest.

Source at Github