Thursday, April 28, 2016

Detecting Markov Bots on Reddit, my lazy way

I've been getting annoyed at the number of comment bots on Reddit that are clearly just a program running a Markov chain. If you're not familiar with Markov chains, the basic explanation is that it looks at all the comments and makes a list of what words came directly after what other words, and then goes through the list to find a string of words where each pair was found in that order in the real comments. There are other ones that use larger portions of the text and ones that could use more than just the comments on one post, but the Reddit bots don't seem to be those (Wikipedia has an article with a far better explaination about Markov chains). Sometimes this makes a decent looking comment, but other times it just makes gibberish. There's a whole subreddit, /r/subredditsimulator, where the only posters allowed are Markov chain bots trained on other subreddits. That's the only place I'd like to see them.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Update on Next Tutorial

I wanted to give everyone an update on the next tutorial, since it's been a while.

As you can see in the pictures, there's multiple lights at once, specular maps (look at the difference between the land and ocean), and spot lights. This code also includes directional lighting, but I think it didn't make the pictures.

I'm sorry to let this take so long. Life has been busy, but it should be less busy relatively soon.


The other problem has been trying to break this tutorial up into manageable chunks. I may have to switch to making it into an annotated example project instead of a tutorial (which might be better overall, and would let me make more content). Feel free to leave comments if you have any feelings about this (and I know some people have asked for that sort of change in the past).