Week Five

This week was a little different than any of the past weeks since the Fourth of July was in the middle of the week. Because of the holiday we did not have a lunch meeting and our reading meeting was moved to a different day. The end of this week marked the halfway point of the program. Though I am enjoying the program and my research I will be happy to return home and start the fall semester.

On Sunday of this week I attended a local board game meetup. Every sunday a book and game store called Pandemonium has open board game night. You have the option of bringing your own games or borrowing one of the many they have. Every other Sunday the organization of people from the internet, that I went and met with a couple weeks ago, have their own special board game night. They try to switch up locations, but this week it was at Pandemonium though because there was a magic of the gathering tournament going on we had to find a new location and ended up at tavern on the square. Though I had already ate dinner I did have some calamari, which was excellent and a couple bites of the chocolate cake, which was very rich. All of the games I played I had never played before. I was able to catch on quickly with all the games I played and had a wonderful time. Some of the games I played were munchkins, we didn't playtest this either, and guillotine. I plan to attend the rest of the board game meetups over the next five weeks.

For reading group this week our material was more formal, making it harder to understand the content of each paper. The three papers we read were Reversible Computation, Logical Reversibility of Computation by C. H. Bennett, and Nanocomputers and Reversible Logic by J. Storrs Hall. I don.t feel that I gained much from this week's readings, though I found the topics to be interesting. Something interesting I have noticed through the weekly readings is a lot of times people who do theory research tend to base their findings around idea that are impossible to ever do. I have found that I enjoy the part of theoretical computer science that at some point in the future will be useful and applicable.

This week I felt as if I made a lot of progress in my research, though I have yet to prove or find something new. I started coding a genetic algorithm in C# using visual studio. I must say it was nice to start a coding project. I plan to use this genetic algorithm to generate different patterns and fun them a set number of times then compare them to the original pattern. I am hoping through doing this I will be able to find one of the missing oscillators. To aid in designing my genetic algorithm I have put all the known oscillators in a spreadsheet in hopes that I will be able to apply some sort of bounds to my genetic algorithm. So far I have to found any way to apply any bound, though I believe that I will be able to put bounds on the density. I am still searching to find more information and formal papers on oscillators and if there is a w ay to create them other than blindly guessing.