Portfolio :: Ben Humphreys

Wowr on Rubyforge

Wowr

Wowr is a Ruby library for the World of Warcraft Armory. It provides a native interface to the XML-based data of the armory, supporting item, character, guild and team arena data.

world of warcraft
api

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Game Bloc

Game Bloc is a retail store written as an experiment into using Ruby on Rails for larger projects. It features caching and more heavy optimisation.

game
retail

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(Requires Facebook)

LifeXP

Have you ever thought "I levelled up!" when you learnt something new? With LifeXP you can show your friends when you gain experience in your favourite skills.

LifeXP is a small application written using Ruby on Rails and the RFacebook plugin.

facebook
rails

PDF 960kB

The Role of Receiver Error in Evolutionary Systems

Abstract: Evolutionary computing allows for the creation of simulations to test theories and further our understanding of the natural world. One area of recent investigation is that of signalling systems; in nature, male signallers advertise their quality to female receivers, who in turn decide whether to accept or reject the possible mate.

Until now, simulations have used simple receiver reward functions that reward the receiver’s accuracy at guessing the signaller’s quality. This does not accurately represent the pressures faced by signal receivers in nature when choosing a mate, as the penalties associated with accepting a poor-quality mate are worse than those of rejecting a high-quality mate.

The project builds on a previous simulation model and implements three explicit fitness functions before moving to an implicit fitness system. Each of the functions are analysed and compared to previous work to determine their effectiveness, from which subsequent improved functions are devised.

It was found that by emulating the binary decision process present in nature, it was possible to use the decisions receivers make to implicitly define their fitness. This approach was more effective than previous explicit systems in emulating the difference of penalties in nature.

signalling systems
evolution
game theory
handicap principle

PDF 96kB

The Semantic Web

An overview of some of the key technologies used in developing the semantic web: from the issues of representation and trust, to semantically described services and agents.

semantic
web
trust

PDF 108kB

Can Trust Be Engineered?

The essay discusses the issues surrounding social trust, such as benefits and betrayal. It goes on to describe the popular authentication method of public-key encryption, before detailing trust strategies and difficulties associated with representing trust.