Gay! How is this hacking related. Come on Hackaday, get it together.

I could see this being useful for measuring analog audio circuits and creating software models of them….

@d0b0: of course it’s hacking related. on a very simple level, hardware hacking tends to deal with math a lot, and being able to generate a function for data points can help you understand how a device works, or possibly to build a circuit that will mimic something that you got data points from. i think it’s awesome personally.

I am now wondering were I can get a copy…
I have an exelent idear for an AI engien.
To conpair all inputs. A series of very basic CPUs interconected create enuf parralel prossessing speed for the interface to conect to the sireal port at maximum posible baud rate.
For example a varying analog source representing speach. Conpaired with a dictionary theosorus combo.
Or sensors around your house conpaired leading to it learning your day to day routine.

An extreamly detailed design structure would be needed.
And it would take a while. But imagen if the program ran for 100 years or more nothing in computer terms but think of what it could learn if it was linked it to a remotly operated veical of some sort to map and interact with it’s enviromet.
Could win a noble prize lol but it would take a life time to program
thought – a modifyed version of a program that creates the circute path ways for micro prosessors desighning the software and hardware – just a thought lol

You mean you guys don’t have Newton’s head in your toolbox?

@Nuchdog: Nope, not much space left between Einstein’s head and the cryo unit.

@Gerrit Coetzee: Roughly half the population can be considered to have two.

My first post here.

This is actually looks like some cool software. Just that one screen show shows it working iterative solutions. It can effectively reverse engineer any observations in RL. Could be useful for many things…

This is awesome. Usable for anything from developing understanding and predictability of natural phenomena to making a new strategy for TBS games. I would love to play with this tool.

This is a great tool. I have been messing about with it for a couple of revisions for finding relationships between motor driver data. temp, heat, current etc. While it seems a pointless exercise, it is helping to shape a good model of a non linear system.
Defo a hack related tool.

How is this different from using the polyfit function in matlab?

One use off the top of my head… Use it to model the characteristics of components when developing SPICE models. MOSFETs and LEDs come to mind, especially MOSFETs and exotic high power LEDs where the manufacturer-supplied models can be pretty awful.

Wolfram|Alpha should turn this into a Web app.

How about making a decent approximation for some function using limited operators. using only +,-,/,* and abs()? Might be useful on a micro with limited math capabilities…

here is what it did with a SIN(x) dataset x from 0..260 in 0.1 degree increments.

y=(4.88622 + 0.0126778*x*abs(0.0114593*x – 1.59466) – 2.90379*abs(0.0114593*x – 1.59466) – 0.0245189*x)/(0.999628 + 53.4167/(58.2545 + x*abs(0.0114593*x – 1.59466))) – 0.134694

Kinda complex but pretty accurate, this one is not as hairy but a little less accurate around 180:

y=4.2249 + 0.0119223*x*abs(1.95332 – 0.0109327*x) – 2.1621*abs(1.98645 – 0.0109327*x) – 0.0234713*x

Might be useful if you don’t have a native sin function and might smaller than a lookup table in code.

I am also thinking it would be great for determining the transfer function of a temp sensor for fast conversions, finding a function to make an LED brightness sweep linear, etc. There are probably a bunch of functions that could be found based on your specific configuration to make robots move smoother, and stuff just work better.

I guess a real engineer would derive these functions from the design, but this hacker probably has to build then observe…

http://www.natnlabs.net

This is a really nice bit of software. Sometimes you don’t need to optimise your model perfectly,so the time spent doing the usualSystem Identification process could be skipped by using an automatically generated ‘best enough’ model.
As for hacking, if you want to do anything haptic, or involving servos or the like, this will make your life a whole lot easier.

@Brad: Sounds like the IE’s who are forced to take “EE for non-EE’s”..

Awesome =D. Seeing as maths and physics are my favourite classes, this is really pretty cool =). Thanks Hack-A-Day ^_^.

Roger Alsing made software similar to quite some time ago, using genetic algorithms.

http://rogeralsing.com/2008/02/07/genetic-programming-math/

Inspired by that, I made my own php version* to experiment and learn. Funny thing about genetic algorithms though.. GAs find the best solution to the dataset you present. Just don’t expect the function to work well outside the boundaries of the initial dataset. :P

*yes, yes, I know php isn’t a good choice performance wise, but it’s just so simple and accessible for “prototyping” and just plain fun projects.