Book is out, please test experiments

[Georg Martius]

Dear all,

Ralf and I are very happy to announce that our book "The Playful Machine"
finally appeared. The webpage [1] for the book is still partly under
construction.

We are now finishing the last experiments and we would like to ask you to test
whether it works on your machine and how you come along. You find the webpage
at [2] (not yet linked in the menu).
The "Experiment 10.11: The world of playful machines" is not yet finished, all
others are.

Please reply if you tried it and tell which machine you used: (Platform, linux
distri, kernel, graphics card (driver)) and whether the installation
instructions are okay etc.

Thanks a lot!
Georg

[1] http://www.playfulmachines.com
[2] http://www.playfulmachines.com/experiments.html

[mark...@th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de]

Dear Ralf and Georg,

I was able to run all the simulations on my machine
kernel: 2.6.38-13-generic 32 bit
graphics: Radeon Mobility HD 2600 Series
Ubuntu 11.04

The only problem I've noticed is constant flickering of
the graphical window. The graphical window is always
on top of all other windows opened (e.g. Firefox is
always behind it). Similar when I tried to use MatrixViz
in the last simulation flickering increased and the
graphs on MatrixViz were unreadable.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Dimitrije

[Georg Martius]

Hi Dimitrije,

thanks for trying!

On Monday 05 March 2012 11:19:30 you wrote:
> Dear Ralf and Georg,
>
> I was able to run all the simulations on my machine
> kernel: 2.6.38-13-generic 32 bit
> graphics: Radeon Mobility HD 2600 Series
> Ubuntu 11.04

I am glad to hear that ;-)

>
> The only problem I've noticed is constant flickering of
> the graphical window. The graphical window is always
> on top of all other windows opened (e.g. Firefox is
> always behind it). Similar when I tried to use MatrixViz
> in the last simulation flickering increased and the
> graphs on MatrixViz were unreadable.

could it be that it is this BUG of the Unity desktop?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-2d/+bug/800599

can you try any other opengl program like glxgears or so.

Thanks and best regards,
Georg

[Simón Smith]

Hi Georg,

all the simulations that I've tried are working.

Speed is very slow, much more slow than with my local LpzRobots installation. When I try max speed simulations can go to 3.5x but in 1x the real speed is around 0.4x.

I'm having "ghosting" with the red channel, i.e., the red objects leaves a shadow of it's previous position (only one step back).

Directory "resources" is under version control.

My system:

Ubuntu 11.10, GNOME shell 3

Memory 3.8 GiB

Processor Intel® Core™ i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz × 4 

OS type 64-bit, x86_64

Kernel 3.0.0-16-generic

Graphics Intel® Sandybridge Desktop  

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)

OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc

OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Desktop 

OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.11

OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

OpenGL extensions:

Binary ThePlayfulMachine-Experiments-0.95-x86_64-kernel-3

Best regards,

Simon.