Thanks to the generous folks at community.haskell.org, hback now has a public darcs repo!

The hback googlecode page has been updated to reflect this. Google’s SVN is no longer officially supported, so do update your sources.

Checkout the source:

darcs get --partial http://code.haskell.org/hback/

In other news, I’m still swamped with school work, but will be back to working on hback by the end of next week. Stay tuned!

Also, if you haven’t recently checked the comments from the original post, you really ought to! The readers have raised some questions and made quite a few good arguments about protocols and limitations of dual n-back tests.

It’s a bit unofficial for now, but since people keep asking, I’ve started an hback project on google-code:

http://code.google.com/p/hback/

The source checkout includes the latest development version of the game. Eventually, I would like to host a public darcs repo for the project, but for now this will have to do.

If you are currently using or considering playing with hback, I highly recommend you checkout the latest trunk. It’s a much-improved version over 0.0.2 since it duplicates the protocol as described in the paper. If you spot any deviations, please do let me know. As soon as the most important tickets are fixed, this will be the basis for the much-revised 0.0.3 version. Additionally, I would like to explore building a win32 executable based on this trunk.

Do check out the code and post any tickets or comments! Better to fix them now than after the release :)

This is an update to my hback memory game. You can always grab the latest version from hback-latest.tar.gz.

Based on feedback (kudos James and Joseph) I’ve refactored a lot of the code and added the following feature requests:

• Left and right arrows toggle the buttons on/off. Joseph’s suggestion worked fine, but on my setup it only highlighted the correct button. This seems a little counterintuitive to me since the API calls it an “activation”; my version looks for key events and automatically toggle the buttons.
• Game has a Pause mode which can be toggled on/off with 'p'
• Added some comments ;-)
• Added a score logger which I think would be cool for eventually analyzing lots of data (eg. pretty graphs of user improvement over time). This can be disabled with turnOffLogging=True in hback.hs, although I don’t see why you would want to: I’m not sending your data over the wire to analyze average IQs of Haskell hackers (yet).

I think the biggest changes are under the hood: I refactored the widgets and state data structures and, as a consequence, a lot of the remaining code. Hopefully the code is a little clearer on what it’s doing and why. Send in all your feedback and ideas! (I do try to get around to implementing them, eventually.)

Per user requests, here are some of the liberties I took with the original paper:
(more…)

hback-0.0.tar.gz
Update: Released hback-0.0.2
Download Latest: hback-latest.tar.gz

Based on a recent research paper that claims fluid intelligence could be improved by training working memory, I wrote up a dual n-back test memory game in Haskell and gtk2hs. This is an alpha release: all comments are most welcome.

Gameplay

The n-back memory game tests whether the player can remember if the nth previous turn matches the current one. The dual n-back test will measure how well the player can remember both visual and graphic stimuli simultaneously.

(more…)

I’ve updated the hlean program. Aside from some cosmetic changes, documentation, and cabal package options, the main change is the segmentation fault fix. The program now correctly builds as a cabal package and runs. See hlean for a full description and usage details. You can download hlean 0.1.12 here. See the included README.txt for installation instructions.

UPDATE: hlean 0.1.2 available

I needed a program to find duplicate files in my constantly growing jungle, commonly referred to as a $HOME directory. I also needed a real motivation to sit down and write something in Haskell. After several cups of tea, I realized I could kill both birds with one heavy laser-targetting sniper rifle. After all, isn’t that what they say about Haskell: once you can get it to compile, you’re almost done?

hlean.hs is a command line program that takes any number of directories passed as arguments, recursively find all files, hashes them (defaults to sha256), and asks what to do with any duplicate sets found. It works fine for me, but since this is the first release, there are certainly some rough edges and caveats. Additionally, only you are responsible for your data; use this at your own risk: I cannot be held responsible if your computer blows up in a freak fire accident and coincidentally all the monkeys escape from the zoo.

(more…)