I've been trying to learn Rust on again and off again for the past few months. To motivate myself, I wanted to fool around a bit with Z3 (an SMT solver) in Rust. This quickly turned into quite a bit of a struggle, as while there are Rust bindings available, I'm finding them fairly difficult to work with. I'm not sure if this difficulty stems from the bindings being unergonomic, or that my Rust knowledge is still too basic. Furthermore, I also haven't been able to find any good, accessible exa...| Simon Vandevelde Homepage
Update: we recently investigated the synergy between DMN and GPT-3 and published a paper on it. You can read all about it here. ChatGPT has been all the rage, lately. Many people have been experimenting with it, from producing code and passing a computer science exam to succesfully writing emails disputing a parking fine. So, as a researcher in symbolic AI, this begs the question: can it craft decision models for us? This blog posts describes my attempt to have ChatGPT generate a simple Decis...| Simon Vandevelde Homepage
To play music on my pc, I use two different applications: cmus, for my local music ncspot, to connect to Spotify Both are minimalistic applications that work right out of your terminal. It would be cool, I thought, to show their status on my Sway status bar. So, I spent some time figuring out how to best do so. If you read this post, you can do so too! It's actually fairly simple: I have a status.sh script which is called by swaybar to update the text every second (see Pomodoro timer in Sway)...| Simon Vandevelde Homepage
Almost two years ago, during the first covid dip in Belgium, I tried my hand at floral arrangements. And I've been hooked ever since! What started as an excuse to get my cousins round and spend time with our grandmother quickly grew into a bi-monthly tradition. The story of how we got started goes a bit as follows: my grandmother used to regularly partake in floral arrangement workshops, hosted by the local flower shop. With the arrival of covid lockdowns, she remarked that she was sad that t...| Simon Vandevelde Homepage
Catan is a wonderful boardgame about strategy and chance. However, the chances of the game can become extremely skewed based on the board layout, which is typically decided randomly. This post describes how we can tackle this, and implements a tool (available online) to generate balanced boards using the IDP-Z3 reasoning engine, based on First Order Logic. Image from the Wikimedia Commons. Catan boards and balance Lets first get into what constitutes a Catan board. As shown in the image above...| Simon Vandevelde Homepage
A while ago we had the idea for an "Art with AI" type project: a probabilistic extension of Game of Life (GoL), the well-known cellular automaton. The idea behind GoL is to start with a grid of living and dead cells, and to generate the "next" generation based on a set of rules. For example, in the image below we generate the evolution of the left grid to end up with the middle grid, and then do the same to the middle to end up with the right one. The rules used for these generations are as f...| Simon Vandevelde Homepage
I recently wrote a Leuven.AI stories blog on my work on a knowledge-based decision support system for adhesive selection.| simonvandevelde.be
Sudoku is probably one of the most well-known logic games of all time.| simonvandevelde.be
A few days ago, I came across a post titled Solving a "Layton Puzzle" with Prolog, in which the author describes a Prolog implementation of a puzzle from one of the Professor Layton games.| simonvandevelde.be
In my previous blog post, I showed how we can solve a puzzle in the IDP-Z3 reasoning engine. | simonvandevelde.be