A quantum physics effect to teach, a puzzle to build, a problem to solve, a tool to learn!
Polarizing filters are plastic films that let light shine through only in a particular direction (angle). Combining two at 90 degrees completely blocks light.
Very counterintuitively, inserting a third filter between two filters at 90 degrees allows some light shine through!
This interesting effect can only be explained with quantum physics, as brilliantly explained in this 3Blue1Brown video.
Polarizing filter films are cheap... So I wanted to create a carboard toy to demo this effect in a suprising way to my kids!
A puzzle to build
Idea is to build a puzzle around this weird effect.
I want to build a cardboard octagon with many "windows" (holes), each window covered with one polarizing filter at a certain angle, like this:
Stacking multiple such octagons on top of one another will block light in some combination of filters and not others, depending on the individual filter angles. Moreover, rotating octagons in the stack will make the "displayed pattern" change!
A problem to solve
One a set of "patterns" to display is decided, is it possible to write a program to determine the assignment of filter angles, for each "window" in each octagon, that is able to produce them all?
In principle, yes! In practice, there's an explosion in the number of possible combinations! Eg. 8 angles × 10 windows × 8 slices × 5 octagons × 8⁴ rotation combinations × 5! orderings × 5 upside-down flips is about 8 billion.
...a bit too much for simple for loops! I need a smarter approach.
A tool to learn
Google OR-Tools CP-SAT is a powerful constraint programming solver. It can be used to quickly find solutions to huge combinatorial problems - where one has to find one valid assignment to thousands of variables under thousands of constraints within billions of possible combinations (not all of which valid or optimal)!
Solvers are applicable to many problems and are not new in SUSE's tradition - eg. the zypper package manager uses libsolv to compute valid package dependency combinations, and Uyuni uses Optaplanner to compute valid subscription assignments.
CP-SAT is open source, very efficient (actually close to the state of the art in the field) and easily scriptable from Python... a very interesting target to experiment with!
Now I have an excuse to play with this!
Scope of HackWeek
Find a combination that works for a decent example, and actually cut it in cardboard and filters to try it out!
https://github.com/moio/octaopticon
This project is part of:
Hack Week 23
Activity
Comments
-
about 1 year ago by moio | Reply
Day 1 diary - the physical prototyping day
Spent a bit of time into producing good SVGs with Python, then printed them and tried to find dimensions that worked (one big and one small for testing).
After few iterations decided to go with octagonal stars rather than plain octagons:
Then literally hammered out holes with a 10mm punch! Worked beautifully.
Then, cut and tested positioning of filter film:
All seems good from the physical realm so far.
Next up: coding to determine per-hole filter positioning!
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about 1 year ago by moio | Reply
Day 2 diary: mostly coding
CP-SAT
Learnt a lot about CP-SAT, evolved some code I had around to handle:
- a variable number of "pizzas" ("stars with filter windows")
- a variable number of "slices" ("sectors" of stars)
- a variable number of "windows" per "slice"
- a variable number of "angles" filters can be glued on
- a variable number of "images"
Difficult part today is the reordering of "pizzas" in the "pizza stack". Giving that ability makes more combinations possible, but indirection has to be dealt with in code.
Testing
The good part about this problem is that tests can trivially be randomized, so it's easy to see if produced solutions work or not.
The bad part is not all randomized problem instances have a solutions. For those who do not, CP-SAT will happily burn CPUs for hours. I added a pretty arbitrary time limit.
ChatGPT
I used ChatGPT for the scaffolding work - and was quite happy with it:
> Set up a new Python 3.9 based project according to current best practices. > > The project must use the ortools library from Google (note that is a wrapper around a C++ library) > > Include support for: linting, dependency management, github codespace, tests, a Dockerfile, github actions on push and PR including and tests and lint, github actions for release of source archive and docker container on ghcr.io > > Also include a scaffolded README and LICENSE (AGPL) > > The project must compile and work cross platform, including Linux x86 and Mac arm. > > Explain every file created step by step and why
Not a perfect result, but a good result to learn from - faster than stitching together 10 blog posts (for someone not daily into an ecosystem).
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about 1 year ago by moio | Reply
Day 3 diary: 3 failures, 1 success
Failure 1: adding the possibility of re-ordering the stack
I thought that allowing to re-ordering pizzas in the stack could help with storing more "images" - found out that as not the case. On a large set of pseudorandom tests, only an extra 4 out of 186 could be solved by changing the order. Not worth it, commit reverted.
Failure 2: going from a SAT problem to an optimization problem
CP-SAT has the cool ability of allowing to specify an objective function to minimize or maximise - making it simple to reformulate a satisfiability problem in an optimization one. I tried this approach to make the assignments more flexible but failed: I could not find a good way to mix it with the Automaton constraints which I am using to simulate light traveling through a series of filters. Path abandoned for now.
Failure 3: allowing brighter-than-specified pixels
This seemed an easy way to enlarge the solution space - interestingly, almost no effect was visible in tests. Sticking for the simpler approach (to match pixel values exactly) for now.
Success! First small four-pizza prototype works!
I am happy to report that after some serious hammering and cutting...
...and serious gluing of filter films...
...I've got a nice filter set! Notice how filtering of monitor light (which is polarized) changes with rotation!
Now I made four pizzas...
And, in the right order, they will display a programmed X pattern!
I was able to "store" 7 patterns in the four pizzas (a "Y", a "q", the "X" above, an "o", an "I", a "c" and a "K").
Next step: the bigger brother pizza with bigger patterns!
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about 1 year ago by moio | Reply
Day 4 diary: scale up!
Today I dealt with the bigger version of the puzzle. Software scaled just fine!
About hardware I was lucky enough to get help from my son across all phases!
I am really happy with the result, here they are in all their whiteness:
What message did we hid in there? Stay tuned tomorrow for the last demo!
PS. Thanks to colleague AR about having kids do some of the job - that worked great!
-
about 1 year ago by moio | Reply
Day 5 diary: it's a wrap!
Today I created a video to explain progress and results, enjoy!
Tricky part was to get light right - so that it was clearly visible on video. Ended up with an inverted laptop screen covered with an opaque film - otherwise light comes polarized and all behavior is totally different!
Similar Projects
Testing and adding GNU/Linux distributions on Uyuni by juliogonzalezgil
Join the Gitter channel! https://gitter.im/uyuni-project/hackweek
Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. It also manages configuration, can run audits, build image containers, monitor and much more!
Currently there are a few distributions that are completely untested on Uyuni or SUSE Manager (AFAIK) or just not tested since a long time, and could be interesting knowing how hard would be working with them and, if possible, fix whatever is broken.
For newcomers, the easiest distributions are those based on DEB or RPM packages. Distributions with other package formats are doable, but will require adapting the Python and Java code to be able to sync and analyze such packages (and if salt does not support those packages, it will need changes as well). So if you want a distribution with other packages, make sure you are comfortable handling such changes.
No developer experience? No worries! We had non-developers contributors in the past, and we are ready to help as long as you are willing to learn. If you don't want to code at all, you can also help us preparing the documentation after someone else has the initial code ready, or you could also help with testing :-)
The idea is testing Salt and Salt-ssh clients, but NOT traditional clients, which are deprecated.
To consider that a distribution has basic support, we should cover at least (points 3-6 are to be tested for both salt minions and salt ssh minions):
- Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
- Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
- Package management (install, remove, update...)
- Patching
- Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
- Salt remote commands
- Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
- Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
- Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)
- Bonus point: testsuite enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/testsuite)
If something is breaking: we can try to fix it, but the main idea is research how supported it is right now. Beyond that it's up to each project member how much to hack :-)
- If you don't have knowledge about some of the steps: ask the team
- If you still don't know what to do: switch to another distribution and keep testing.
This card is for EVERYONE, not just developers. Seriously! We had people from other teams helping that were not developers, and added support for Debian and new SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap versions :-)
Pending
FUSS
FUSS is a complete GNU/Linux solution (server, client and desktop/standalone) based on Debian for managing an educational network.
https://fuss.bz.it/
Seems to be a Debian 12 derivative, so adding it could be quite easy.
[W]
Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)[W]
Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap script, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator) --> Working for all 3 options (salt minion UI, salt minion bootstrap script and salt-ssh minion from the UI).[W]
Package management (install, remove, update...) --> Installing a new package works, needs to test the rest.[I]
Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). No patches detected. Do we support patches for Debian at all?[W]
Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)[W]
Salt remote commands[ ]
Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
Saline (state deployment control and monitoring tool for SUSE Manager/Uyuni) by vizhestkov
Project Description
Saline is an addition for salt used in SUSE Manager/Uyuni aimed to provide better control and visibility for states deploymend in the large scale environments.
In current state the published version can be used only as a Prometheus exporter and missing some of the key features implemented in PoC (not published). Now it can provide metrics related to salt events and state apply process on the minions. But there is no control on this process implemented yet.
Continue with implementation of the missing features and improve the existing implementation:
authentication (need to decide how it should be/or not related to salt auth)
web service providing the control of states deployment
Goal for this Hackweek
Implement missing key features
Implement the tool for state deployment control with CLI
Resources
https://github.com/openSUSE/saline
Team Hedgehogs' Data Observability Dashboard by gsamardzhiev
Description
This project aims to develop a comprehensive Data Observability Dashboard that provides r insights into key aspects of data quality and reliability. The dashboard will track:
Data Freshness: Monitor when data was last updated and flag potential delays.
Data Volume: Track table row counts to detect unexpected surges or drops in data.
Data Distribution: Analyze data for null values, outliers, and anomalies to ensure accuracy.
Data Schema: Track schema changes over time to prevent breaking changes.
The dashboard's aim is to support historical tracking to support proactive data management and enhance data trust across the data function.
Goals
Although the final goal is to create a power bi dashboard that we are able to monitor, our goals is to 1. Create the necessary tables that track the relevant metadata about our current data 2. Automate the process so it runs in a timely manner
Resources
AWS Redshift; AWS Glue, Airflow, Python, SQL
Why Hedgehogs?
Because we like them.
Symbol Relations by hli
Description
There are tools to build function call graphs based on parsing source code, for example, cscope
.
This project aims to achieve a similar goal by directly parsing the disasembly (i.e. objdump) of a compiled binary. The assembly code is what the CPU sees, therefore more "direct". This may be useful in certain scenarios, such as gdb/crash debugging.
Detailed description and Demos can be found in the README file:
Supports x86 for now (because my customers only use x86 machines), but support for other architectures can be added easily.
Tested with python3.6
Goals
Any comments are welcome.
Resources
https://github.com/lhb-cafe/SymbolRelations
symrellib.py: mplements the symbol relation graph and the disassembly parser
symrel_tracer*.py: implements tracing (-t option)
symrel.py: "cli parser"
ClusterOps - Easily install and manage your personal kubernetes cluster by andreabenini
Description
ClusterOps is a Kubernetes installer and operator designed to streamline the initial configuration
and ongoing maintenance of kubernetes clusters. The focus of this project is primarily on personal
or local installations. However, the goal is to expand its use to encompass all installations of
Kubernetes for local development purposes.
It simplifies cluster management by automating tasks and providing just one user-friendly YAML-based
configuration config.yml
.
Overview
- Simplified Configuration: Define your desired cluster state in a simple YAML file, and ClusterOps will handle the rest.
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- Ongoing Maintenance: Performs routine maintenance tasks such as upgrades, security updates, and resource monitoring.
- Extensibility: Easily extend functionality with custom plugins and configurations.
- Self-Healing: Detects and recovers from common cluster issues, ensuring stability, idempotence and reliability. Same operation can be performed multiple times without changing the result.
- Discreet: It works only on what it knows, if you are manually configuring parts of your kubernetes and this configuration does not interfere with it you can happily continue to work on several parts and use this tool only for what is needed.
Features
- distribution and engine independence. Install your favorite kubernetes engine with your package
manager, execute one script and you'll have a complete working environment at your disposal.
- Basic config approach. One single
config.yml
file with configuration requirements (add/remove features): human readable, plain and simple. All fancy configs managed automatically (ingress, balancers, services, proxy, ...). - Local Builtin ContainerHub. The default installation provides a fully configured ContainerHub available locally along with the kubernetes installation. This configuration allows the user to build, upload and deploy custom container images as they were provided from external sources. Internet public sources are still available but local development can be kept in this localhost server. Builtin ClusterOps operator will be fetched from this ContainerHub registry too.
- Kubernetes official dashboard installed as a plugin, others planned too (k9s for example).
- Kubevirt plugin installed and properly configured. Unleash the power of classic virtualization (KVM+QEMU) on top of Kubernetes and manage your entire system from there, libvirtd and virsh libs are required.
- One operator to rule them all. The installation script configures your machine automatically during installation and adds one kubernetes operator to manage your local cluster. From there the operator takes care of the cluster on your behalf.
- Clean installation and removal. Just test it, when you are done just use the same program to uninstall everything without leaving configs (or pods) behind.
Planned features (Wishlist / TODOs)
- Containerized Data Importer (CDI). Persistent storage management add-on for Kubernetes to provide a declarative way of building and importing Virtual Machine Disks on PVCs for
Selenium with Python by xguo
Description
Try to create test case about Selenium base on Python
Goals
- Knowledge about Selenium with Python
- Create new test case about Selenium
Resources
https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.selenium.dev/
Symbol Relations by hli
Description
There are tools to build function call graphs based on parsing source code, for example, cscope
.
This project aims to achieve a similar goal by directly parsing the disasembly (i.e. objdump) of a compiled binary. The assembly code is what the CPU sees, therefore more "direct". This may be useful in certain scenarios, such as gdb/crash debugging.
Detailed description and Demos can be found in the README file:
Supports x86 for now (because my customers only use x86 machines), but support for other architectures can be added easily.
Tested with python3.6
Goals
Any comments are welcome.
Resources
https://github.com/lhb-cafe/SymbolRelations
symrellib.py: mplements the symbol relation graph and the disassembly parser
symrel_tracer*.py: implements tracing (-t option)
symrel.py: "cli parser"
Enhance UV openQA helper script by mdonis
Description
A couple months ago an UV openQA helper script was created to help/automate the searching phase inside openQA for a given MU to test. The script searches inside all our openQA job groups (qam-sle) related with a given MU and generates an output suitable to add (copy & paste) inside the update log.
This is still a WIP and could use some enhancements.
Goals
- Move script from bash to python: this would be useful in case we want to include this into MTUI in the future. The script will be separate from MTUI for now. The idea is to have this as a CLI tool using the click library or something similar.
- Add option to look for jobs in other sections inside aggregated updates: right now, when looking for regression tests under aggregated updates for a given MU, the script only looks inside the Core MU job group. This is where most of the regression tests we need are located, but some MUs have their regression tests under the YaST/Containers/Security MU job groups. We should keep the Core MU group as a default, but add an option to be able to look into other job groups under aggregated updates.
- Remove the
-a
option: this option is used to indicate the update ID and is mandatory right now. This is a bit weird and goes against posix stardards. It was developed this way in order to avoid using positional parameters. This problem should be fixed if we move the script to python.
Some other ideas to consider:
- Look into the QAM dashboard API. This has more info on each MU, could use this to link general openQA build results, whether the related RR is approved or not, etc
- Make it easier to see if there's regression tests for a package in an openQA test build. Check if there's a possibility to search for tests that have the package name in them inside each testsuite.
- Unit testing?
More ideas TBD
Resources
https://github.com/os-autoinst/scripts/blob/master/openqa-search-maintenance-core-jobs
https://confluence.suse.com/display/maintenanceqa/Guide+on+how+to+test+Updates
Post-Hackweek update
All major features were implemented. Unit tests are still in progress, and project will be moved to the SUSE github org once everything's done. https://github.com/mjdonis/oqa-search
Small healthcheck tool for Longhorn by mbrookhuis
Project Description
We have often problems (e.g. pods not starting) that are related to PVCs not running, cluster (nodes) not all up or deployments not running or completely running. This all prevents administration activities. Having something that can regular be run to validate the status of the cluster would be helpful, and not as of today do a lot of manual tasks.
As addition (read enough time), we could add changing reservation, adding new disks, etc. --> This didn't made it. But the scripts can easily be adopted.
This tool would decrease troubleshooting time, giving admins rights to the rancher GUI and could be used in automation.
Goal for this Hackweek
At the end we should have a small python tool that is doing a (very) basic health check on nodes, deployments and PVCs. First attempt was to make it in golang, but that was taking to much time.
Overview
This tool will run a simple healthcheck on a kubernetes cluster. It will perform the following actions:
node check: This will check all nodes, and display the status and the k3s version. If the status of the nodes is not "Ready" (this should be only reported), the cluster will be reported as having problems
deployment check: This check will list all deployments, and display the number of expected replicas and the used replica. If there are unused replicas this will be displayed. The cluster will be reported as having problems.
pvc check: This check will list of all pvc's, and display the status and the robustness. If the robustness is not "Healthy", the cluster will be reported as having problems.
If there is a problem registered in the checks, there will be a warning that the cluster is not healthy and the program will exit with 1.
The script has 1 mandatory parameter and that is the kubeconf of the cluster or of a node off the cluster.
The code is writen for Python 3.11, but will also work on 3.6 (the default with SLES15.x). There is a venv present that will contain all needed packages. Also, the script can be run on the cluster itself or any other linux server.
Installation
To install this project, perform the following steps:
- Create the directory /opt/k8s-check
mkdir /opt/k8s-check
- Copy all the file to this directory and make the following changes:
chmod +x k8s-check.py
Gen-AI chatbots and test-automation of generated responses by mdati
Description
Start experimenting the generative SUSE-AI chat bot, asking questions on different areas of knowledge or science and possibly analyze the quality of the LLM model response, specific and comparative, checking the answers provided by different LLM models to a same query, using proper quality metrics or tools or methodologies.
Try to define basic guidelines and requirements for quality test automation of AI-generated responses.
First approach of investigation can be based on manual testing: methodologies, findings and data can be useful then to organize valid automated testing.
Goals
- Identify criteria and measuring scales for assessment of a text content.
- Define quality of an answer/text based on defined criteria .
- Identify some knowledge sectors and a proper list of problems/questions per sector.
- Manually run query session and apply evaluation criteria to answers.
- Draft requirements for test automation of AI answers.
Resources
- Announcement of SUSE-AI for Hack Week in Slack
- Openplatform and related 3 LLM models gemma:2b, llama3.1:8b, qwen2.5-coder:3b.
Notes
Foundation models (FMs):
are large deep learning neural networks, trained on massive datasets, that have changed the way data scientists approach machine learning (ML). Rather than develop artificial intelligence (AI) from scratch, data scientists use a foundation model as a starting point to develop ML models that power new applications more quickly and cost-effectively.Large language models (LLMs):
are a category of foundation models pre-trained on immense amounts of data acquiring abilities by learning statistical relationships from vast amounts of text during a self- and semi-supervised training process, making them capable of understanding and generating natural language and other types of content , to perform a wide range of tasks.
LLMs can be used for generative AI (artificial intelligence) to produce content based on input prompts in human language.
Validation of a AI-generated answer is not an easy task to perform, as manually as automated.
An LLM answer text shall contain a given level of informations: correcness, completeness, reasoning description etc.
We shall rely in properly applicable and measurable criteria of validation to get an assessment in a limited amount of time and resources.
Make more sense of openQA test results using AI by livdywan
Description
AI has the potential to help with something many of us spend a lot of time doing which is making sense of openQA logs when a job fails.
User Story
Allison Average has a puzzled look on their face while staring at log files that seem to make little sense. Is this a known issue, something completely new or maybe related to infrastructure changes?
Goals
- Leverage a chat interface to help Allison
- Create a model from scratch based on data from openQA
- Proof of concept for automated analysis of openQA test results
Bonus
- Use AI to suggest solutions to merge conflicts
- This would need a merge conflict editor that can suggest solving the conflict
- Use image recognition for needles
Resources
Timeline
Day 1
- Conversing with open-webui to teach me how to create a model based on openQA test results
- Asking for example code using TensorFlow in Python
- Discussing log files to explore what to analyze
- Drafting a new project called Testimony (based on Implementing a containerized Python action) - the project name was also suggested by the assistant
Day 2
- Using NotebookLLM (Gemini) to produce conversational versions of blog posts
- Researching the possibility of creating a project logo with AI
- Asking open-webui, persons with prior experience and conducting a web search for advice
Highlights
- I briefly tested compared models to see if they would make me more productive. Between llama, gemma and mistral there was no amazing difference in the results for my case.
- Convincing the chat interface to produce code specific to my use case required very explicit instructions.
- Asking for advice on how to use open-webui itself better was frustratingly unfruitful both in trivial and more advanced regards.
- Documentation on source materials used by LLM's and tools for this purpose seems virtually non-existent - specifically if a logo can be generated based on particular licenses
Outcomes
- Chat interface-supported development is providing good starting points and open-webui being open source is more flexible than Gemini. Although currently some fancy features such as grounding and generated podcasts are missing.
- Allison still has to be very experienced with openQA to use a chat interface for test review. Publicly available system prompts would make that easier, though.
Learn how to integrate Elixir and Phoenix Liveview with LLMs by ninopaparo
Description
Learn how to integrate Elixir and Phoenix Liveview with LLMs by building an application that can provide answers to user queries based on a corpus of custom-trained data.
Goals
Develop an Elixir application via the Phoenix framework that:
- Employs Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques
- Supports the integration and utilization of various Large Language Models (LLMs).
- Is designed with extensibility and adaptability in mind to accommodate future enhancements and modifications.
Resources
- https://elixir-lang.org/
- https://www.phoenixframework.org/
- https://github.com/elixir-nx/bumblebee
- https://ollama.com/
Automated Test Report reviewer by oscar-barrios
Description
In SUMA/Uyuni team we spend a lot of time reviewing test reports, analyzing each of the test cases failing, checking if the test is a flaky test, checking logs, etc.
Goals
Speed up the review by automating some parts through AI, in a way that we can consume some summary of that report that could be meaningful for the reviewer.
Resources
No idea about the resources yet, but we will make use of:
- HTML/JSON Report (text + screenshots)
- The Test Suite Status GithHub board (via API)
- The environment tested (via SSH)
- The test framework code (via files)
Run local LLMs with Ollama and explore possible integrations with Uyuni by PSuarezHernandez
Description
Using Ollama you can easily run different LLM models in your local computer. This project is about exploring Ollama, testing different LLMs and try to fine tune them. Also, explore potential ways of integration with Uyuni.
Goals
- Explore Ollama
- Test different models
- Fine tuning
- Explore possible integration in Uyuni
Resources
- https://ollama.com/
- https://huggingface.co/
- https://apeatling.com/articles/part-2-building-your-training-data-for-fine-tuning/
SUSE Prague claw machine by anstalker
Project Description
The idea is to build a claw machine similar to e.g. this one:
Why? Well, it could be a lot of fun!
But also it's a great way to dispense SUSE and openSUSE merch like little Geekos at events like conferences, career fairs and open house events.
Goal for this Hackweek
Build an arcade claw machine.
Resources
In French, an article about why you always lose in claw machine games:
We're looking for handy/crafty people in the Prague office:
- woodworking XP or equipment
- arduino/raspi embedded programming knowledge
- Anthony can find a budget for going to GM and buying servos and such ;)
Port some classic game to Linux by MDoucha
Let's pick some old classic game, reverse engineer the data formats and game rules and write an open source engine for it from scratch. Some games from 1990s are simple enough that we could have a playable prototype by the end of the week.
Write which games you'd like to hack on in the comments. Don't forget to check e.g. on Open Source Game Clones, Github and SourceForge whether the game is ported already.
Hack Week 24 - Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares & Chaos Overlords
Work on Master of Orion II continues but we can hack more than one game. Chaos Overlords is a dystopian, lighthearted, cyberpunk turn-based strategy game originally released in 1996 for Windows 95 and Mac OS. The player takes on the role of a Chaos Overlord, attempting to control a city. Gameplay involves hiring mercenary gangs and deploying them on an 8-by-8 grid of city sectors to generate income, occupy sectors and take over the city.
How to ~~install & play~~ observe the decompilation progress:
- Clone the Git repository
- A playable reimplementation does not exist yet, but when it does, it will be linked in the repository mentioned above.
Further work needed:
- Analyze the remaining unknown data structures, most of which are related to the AI.
- Decompile the AI completely. The strong AI is part of the appeal of the game. It cannot be left out.
- Reimplement the game.
Hack Week 20, 21, 22 & 23 - Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares
Master of Orion II is one of the greatest turn-based 4X games of the 1990s. Explore the galaxy, colonize planets, research new technologies, fight space monsters and alien empires and in the end, become the ruler of the galaxy one way or another.
How to install & play:
- Clone the Git repository
- Run
./bootstrap; ./configure; make && make install
- Copy all *.LBX files from the original Master of Orion II to the installation data directory (
/usr/local/share/openorion2
by default) - Run
openorion2
Further work needed:
- Analyze the rest of the original savegame format and a few remaining data files.
- Implement most of the game. The open source engine currently supports only loading saved games from the original version and viewing the galaxy map, fleet management and list of known planets.
Hack Week 19 - Signus: The Artifact Wars
Signus is a Czech turn-based strategy game similar to Panzer General or Battle Isle series. Originally published in 1998 and open-sourced by the original developers in 2003.
How to install & play:
- Clone the Git repository
- Run
./bootstrap; ./configure; make && make install
in bothsignus
andsignus-data
directories. - Run
signus
Further work needed:
- Create openSUSE package
- Implement full support for original game data (the open source version uses slightly different data file contents but original game data can be converted using a script).
SUSE AI Meets the Game Board by moio
Use tabletopgames.ai’s open source TAG and PyTAG frameworks to apply Statistical Forward Planning and Deep Reinforcement Learning to two board games of our own design. On an all-green, all-open source, all-AWS stack!
Results: Infrastructure Achievements
We successfully built and automated a containerized stack to support our AI experiments. This included:
- a Fully-Automated, One-Command, GPU-accelerated Kubernetes setup: we created an OpenTofu based script, tofu-tag, to deploy SUSE's RKE2 Kubernetes running on CUDA-enabled nodes in AWS, powered by openSUSE with GPU drivers and gpu-operator
- Containerization of the TAG and PyTAG frameworks: TAG (Tabletop AI Games) and PyTAG were patched for seamless deployment in containerized environments. We automated the container image creation process with GitHub Actions. Our forks (PRs upstream upcoming):
./deploy.sh
and voilà - Kubernetes running PyTAG (k9s
, above) with GPU acceleration (nvtop
, below)
Results: Game Design Insights
Our project focused on modeling and analyzing two card games of our own design within the TAG framework:
- Game Modeling: We implemented models for Dario's "Bamboo" and Silvio's "Totoro" and "R3" games, enabling AI agents to play thousands of games ...in minutes!
- AI-driven optimization: By analyzing statistical data on moves, strategies, and outcomes, we iteratively tweaked the game mechanics and rules to achieve better balance and player engagement.
- Advanced analytics: Leveraging AI agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and random action selection, we compared performance metrics to identify optimal strategies and uncover opportunities for game refinement .
- more about Bamboo on Dario's site
- more about R3 on Silvio's site (italian, translation coming)
- more about Totoro on Silvio's site
A family picture of our card games in progress. From the top: Bamboo, Totoro, R3
Results: Learning, Collaboration, and Innovation
Beyond technical accomplishments, the project showcased innovative approaches to coding, learning, and teamwork:
- "Trio programming" with AI assistance: Our "trio programming" approach—two developers and GitHub Copilot—was a standout success, especially in handling slightly-repetitive but not-quite-exactly-copypaste tasks. Java as a language tends to be verbose and we found it to be fitting particularly well.
- AI tools for reporting and documentation: We extensively used AI chatbots to streamline writing and reporting. (Including writing this report! ...but this note was added manually during edit!)
- GPU compute expertise: Overcoming challenges with CUDA drivers and cloud infrastructure deepened our understanding of GPU-accelerated workloads in the open-source ecosystem.
- Game design as a learning platform: By blending AI techniques with creative game design, we learned not only about AI strategies but also about making games fun, engaging, and balanced.
Last but not least we had a lot of fun! ...and this was definitely not a chatbot generated line!
The Context: AI + Board Games
Understand and maybe implement optimal solution finder for Rubik's Cube using IDA* algorithm by aschnell
The Rubik's Cube celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The goal of this hackweek project is to understand the IDA* (the star is part of the name - not a link to a footnote) algorithm that can be used to find an optimal solution for any (valid) starting condition of a Rubik's cube. The IDA* algorithm also has other applications, e.g. 15-puzzle and pathfinding. I read one paper [1] about it but unfortunately did not understand it well. In any case it is once again graph theory (it is always graph theory if you look at a problem long enough).
Sure there are already implementations of it, e.g.:
https://github.com/Jai0212/Rubiks-Cube-Solver-Using-IDA-Star/
The next hackweek projects are kind of preset already:
Detect cube condition via camera
Build robot to solve real physical Rubik's Cube
[1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos402/papers/korfrubik.pdf